A Different Doctor, A Different Exile: Book 2 - A Nexus of Strangeness
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Time has been damaged, people are freezing while others are moving, and strange creatures and people are appearing in the streets. Past is mixing up with the future in the 1950s. Only the Doctor, a renegade Time Lady from Gallifrey and exiled to Earth can stop this. Also present is the Doctor, another Time Lord from Gallifrey.
1. Chapter 1

**I don't own Doctor Who or the Twilight Zone.**

**This is the second story of my alternate Doctor series - the first is a Quatermass crossover - A Different Doctor, A Different Exile - Wrong Time and Rockets.' **

**Please let me know what you think. **

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**A Different Doctor, A Different Exile. **

**A Nexus of Strangeness. **

The day had just started out so normally as well. It had started out as the kind of ordinary and boring day common in London, but it became very clear something weird was happening.

On the London Underground at various stations, everyone was taken by surprise when with a flash of light in every case something happened, and it was happening everywhere they looked. In Baker Street on the Hammersmith and City line, for instance, the station seemed to blur as the modern electrical lighting seemed to mix with old-fashioned gaslighting. On the platforms, everyone of the 1950s were surprised when groups of people wearing similar clothing to themselves, but looked slightly different appeared, holding their hands to their ears, talking to themselves, while men wearing the long frock coats and top hats of Victorian Britain walked up and down with ladies wearing the basket-like skirts and petticoats of the same era.

On the tracks, a steam drawn train puffed into the station, then it was replaced by an unpainted grey-silver train before it was replaced by a more futuristic brightly coloured model.

At King's Cross, a group of commuters heading for one of the more northern stations were shocked to see an old-fashioned steam locomotive puffing into one of the stations, before they saw one set of tracks disappear, only to be replaced by what looked like a completely different track with a thick pipe sitting next to it. Those watching it were surprised to see the tracks altering, only for a flash of light to announce the arrival of a futuristic-looking train moving silently over the rails. When the train came to a stop, the doors opened and a stream of commuters came pouring out, some of them wearing the old fashioned clothes of Victorian England, while others wore clothes more in line with the modern-day.

In the air, zeppelins appeared with their propeller blades beating the air as they moved ponderously through the air, like whales of the sky. Next to the zeppelins larger and sleeker-looking airships appeared, in a flash of blue light, which crackled through the air, while aircraft which resembled Spitfires appeared and much larger and more futuristic jet planes joined them in the sky.

On the ground near Trafalgar square, a bright blue light discharged a number of men wearing armour that looked like it had it come from a movie about Romans, while others showed a number of men wearing padded body armour which put comic book lovers in mind of something out of Judge Dredd. Indeed, the armour was almost a Dead Ringer for Judge Dredd, with the helmet alone looking virtually identical.

People started running in fear as a number of pepperpot shaped things appeared out of thin air. They screamed, "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" And they fired what appeared to be some kind of weapon, and people fell screaming to the ground as their nervous systems were fried.

The pepper pot things were not the only things which appeared in the streets.

Sewer lids flew open as an army of silver men slowly clambered out of the sewers and marched towards the frightened crowd, their silver forms glinting in the sunlight as they towered over the humans in the streets. They were joined by other silver-armoured figures who had the same basic featured but were less or more heavily armoured, and either had to carry their own weapons or had them built-in.

Window dummies starting to come alive, and smashed their way out into the street, startling the already terrified people, who were sent running as they rushed to safety, only to encounter large, shaggy creatures that roared at them while incongruously holding a weird oddly shaped gun, which shot a strange glowing web at them.

And then they all stopped. Some people were still moving, looking around in confusion before they froze as well, and the previously frozen people and vehicles spread across different eras began moving again.

Time was damaged. And the effects were obvious everywhere in London.

XXX

In a laboratory in a scientific complex operated by the British Rocket Group who had been founded by Professor Bernard Quatermass, with the express desire to develop technology which would allow humans to leave Earth, and begin to explore outer space, and to enrich and enlighten the human race through scientific exploration and discovery, in one of the many laboratories on the base stood a tall blue police box. Outwardly it looked no different from the many police boxes which were common on street corners across the country. It wasn't a police box; it was the disguise for a ship, with the interior existing in a temporal dimension the human mind had no means of truly understanding at their current level.

This was a TARDIS - a Time And Relative Dimension In Space ship, a time vessel constructed by the Time Lords of Gallifrey. The Time Lords were an ancient species which had become so advanced in the universe, they had become the Lords of Time after they had created the Time Vortex, a universe-spanning wormhole, and had begun experimenting with temporal mechanics to achieve and attain incredible powers. Eventually, they had constructed ships like the TARDIS which were capable of travelling through time and space.

The TARDIS was old by Time Lord standards, however, it was a standard model, with the only advancements being in the design of the console, and some of the other systems. Beyond that, the TARDIS was no different from another ship of its class.

Standing near the console was the TARDIS's pilot, a woman with long brown hair with blonde streaks, wearing a simple and formal suit of the era. This was the Doctor, now in her third incarnation, and was in the early years of her exile to Earth after spending years travelling the universe and interfering in the affairs of the universe, thereby breaking one of the Time Lord's sacred laws.

The Time Lords may have removed the Doctor's finer knowledge of TARDIS mechanics, but they had not done much about her knowledge of temporal theory, but right now the Doctor was stunned by everything her senses, and the TARDIS scanners, were telling her.

"What is going on?" the Doctor looked down at the instruments in front of her, thinking for a moment there must be a mistake; she had done a huge amount of work on the TARDIS navigational systems, and the sensors ever since she had been exiled by her own people, partly because she didn't want to be completely focused on getting away from Earth, but also because she felt it was about time she actually knew more about the old Type 40 she had stolen from Gallifrey.

But while she had done a huge amount of work on the TARDIS, the Doctor admitted to herself there was a vast amount that still needed to be done, but as she studied the console, she felt out of her depth. When she had come to the TARDIS this morning to see if there was anything she could do before she carried out her other work on behalf of the Rocket Group, the Doctor had not expected this.

She didn't want to believe what the instruments were telling her, but it was the truth.

Time was _shattered. _

The Doctor ran a hand through her hair as she tried to think about what could have caused this while she was aware the damage seemed to have extended in both directions along the whole of Earth's timeline, and even touched a few alternates, if the readings she was getting from the console were accurate, and it was bleeding into the current day.

The Doctor desperately manipulated the console to help her make sense of what was happening, and what caused it, but as the TARDIS worked she was already running through a list of possibilities for how this had happened. The first was someone's misguided attempt to develop a time machine, and it hadn't been stable enough to use, causing this effect. The second was similar, although it was more accidental; the activation of a warp engine which was overpowered would be enough to punch holes into space and time, but the Doctor doubted it would be that, not if the entirety of Earth's timeline was being connected.

The last possibility was that a fully functional time machine had suddenly had an accident within the Time Vortex, and it had simply ripped holes into the universe, and as she thought about it, the Doctor guessed it was either option one or three, nothing else would fit in. But what surprised her was there didn't seem to be any sign of Time Lord involvement so far; that worried her, her people had their flaws, but they wouldn't just leave anything like this happening. The console let out a chirp as information came streaming in, and she studied it just as the TARDIS began to dematerialise.

"What?!" the Doctor yelped as she instantly jumped into action, wondering for a moment if the temporal damage had released enough energy to knock the inhibitor out of alignment or if she had accidentally touched any of the dematerialisation controls, but she hadn't. Then she realised the truth. "Oh no," she groaned when she realised the truth.

The Time Lords had taken control of her TARDIS and were moving her ship through the Time Vortex closer to London. The Doctor quickly checked the instruments as she tried to get an idea of where the Time Lords were sending her ship.

"Morden?" she whispered when she saw where the damage was sourced. "Why there?"

She shrugged her shoulders deciding it didn't matter, and indeed it didn't, and she took a look at the databank to see what it had picked up before the Time Lords had begun moving her ship.

As she read the information, she backed away, looking at the screen with dread. "Oh, no. Not that!" she whispered.


	2. Chapter 2

I am so sorry it's taken me so long to update.

Anyway, I still don't own Doctor Who or The Twilight Zone.

Please let me know what you think, enjoy. And Merry Christmas.

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A Nexus of Strangeness.

Ian grabbed the console just as the TARDIS lurched again as the ship wheezed and groaned as it struggled to materialise in whatever new time and space it was near this time. "What's happening now, Doctor?"

The Doctor grunted as he tried to maintain his own grip on the console and still multitask with checking the readouts. "I-I'm not sure, my boy," he said.

Ian and Barbara shared a quick glance, both noticing at the same time how the Doctor wasn't even trying to save face in this situation. They realised very quickly that whatever was happening had taken the Doctor's usual facade of knowing what was going on around them because he was surprised.

Neither Ian nor Barbara liked the implications of the Doctor's confusion.

They had both worked out very quickly that although the Doctor didn't have any real control over the TARDIS, he usually gave the impression that he did know what was happening. They had no idea if whatever was happening was outside of his experience, or there were many reasons for this rough landing the Doctor couldn't entirely put his finger on it.

Ian hoped it was the latter rather than the former; when it came to travelling through time both the Doctor and Susan were both experts, especially since their knowledge of temporal theory was greater than anything currently understood in Ian and Barbara's own time.

"What could be causing this Susan?" Barbara asked their former student, clearly hoping she would give a straight answer.

Susan was about to reply when the next lurch proved too much for her to handle and she was thrown across the room when the artificial gravity in the console room was shaken in her part of the room. Susan groaned as her back impacted on the wall and she slid down.

"SUSAN!" the Doctor called, looking at where his granddaughter had ended up with terror. But the girl feebly raised a hand just as the TARDIS finally wheezed to a halt before appearing to land with a crash which sent the inhabitants of the time machine thrown everywhere.

Ian groaned and gasped as he was sent flying while he felt himself momentarily becoming weightless before his back hit the wall, and the impact caused his head to slam into the wall where he was stunned.

Ian would never really know just how long he spent on the ground, but when he opened his eyes he found himself looking into Barbara's fearful expression, which became relieved when she saw he was awake. She helped him up and walked him back to the console. Ian's head was still throbbing, so it took him a few minutes to realise Susan and the Doctor were only just starting to come around as well.

"Are you two alright?" Ian managed to force out even with his throbbing head which made it difficult for him to concentrate.

"Yes, just about," Susan gasped before she took a deep breath and stood shakily upright again. She started for the console, but she staggered back clutching her head in pain.

"You don't look it, Susan," Barbara pointed out, looking like she wanted nothing more than to go over to the girl and see if she was in one piece, but Ian could see his fellow schoolteacher was just as shaken as he was, and he realised it had taken her a lot of effort just to lean against the console. She couldn't help Susan if she wanted to.

"I'll be alright in a moment," Susan nodded just as her grandfather stood up and started walking slowly towards the console. For once the Doctor's confident attitude appeared to have left him, and now he resembled to Ian a shell-shocked old cat. But still, the Doctor grasped the walls of the console room and used his hands to move him slowly towards Susan. When he reached the girl he helped her steady herself, and then they both supported each other to stand by the console.

The moment he found himself leaning against the console, the Doctor started examining the controls.

Ian watched him for a moment, letting him gather his bearings for a bit. "What happened, Doctor?"

"I don't know," the Doctor replied as he examined the TARDIS read-outs for a moment. "But it had nothing to do with the TARDIS."

"Are you sure?" Barbara asked uncertainly, sending a sceptical glance towards Ian.

Susan nodded as she looked up from her own scan of the controls. "Yes, Barbara," she said. "Whatever caused that rough trip was outside in the Time Vortex; the TARDIS did its best to compensate for the worst of it, but some of it still leaked in. Put it this way; if it was bad in the micro-universe inside the ship, think how bad it would have been if we were travelling in a conventional ship."

Barbara thought about the time she and her parents went over on the ferry to the Isle of Wright when she had been a child, and they had gone over on a day where the weather was rough. She didn't need to think, she knew how rough it could be, but they had never encountered anything this bad in the TARDIS before.

"What could cause such a rough trip anyway?" Ian asked.

"I haven't the faintest idea, yet. There are certain anomalies in the Vortex which we travel in time and space through which can disrupt our ability to travel effectively, Chesterton," the Doctor explained as he examined the controls. "It could be a Time Storm, but I doubt it; the TARDIS is programmed to monitor the Vortex to help us avoid Storms like that. It also doesn't help us in the least that the TARDIS instruments are still shaken by the….er, disturbance."

_I hate it when the Doctor is lost for words when it comes to describing things, _Ian thought privately to himself.

"Do you know where we are?" Barbara asked.

The Doctor shook his head. "No."

"All of the instruments are affected," Susan explained grimly, looking at the doors worriedly before she glanced at the scanner. "But maybe the scanner systems are alright?" she asked the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded and he silently turned the scanner on. Ian peered closely at it, thankful that whatever it was they'd passed through hadn't damaged the scanner circuitry. However as he looked up at the screen, he thought for a moment he was looking at a movie set in a museum or something. The outside of the TARDIS was showing a conventional-looking street, and there were people as far as he could make out, but there was something about them that was wrong.

The first thing was they were dressed in different costumes; Ian and Barbara had both been time travelling in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Susan long enough, and they'd seen several different time zones through Earth's history. Ian recognised Victorian, Edwardian, and Elizabethan era outfits, worn by men, women, and children alike. There were even people wearing clothes Ian was more familiar with, although a few people were wearing clothes he wasn't familiar with. For example, there was a girl who appeared to be around Susan's own physical age (he and Barbara had learnt over their travels with the Doctor Susan was older than she appeared), wearing a pair of trousers with what appeared to have rips and tears in them, making her look like her lower body was striped like a tiger's pelt.

As the Doctor adjusted the scanner control to take it in a three hundred and eighty-degree view, Ian frowned as he caught sight of horses pulling coaches and old and modern looking cars.

The second thing was the most ominous.

Everyone outside the TARDIS was frozen. They weren't moving, none of them. They were all standing as still as statues.

"Interesting," the Doctor said, making Ian tense as he heard the tone of the old man's voice before he actually turned. The Doctor and Susan were both looking at the screen with worry on their faces, and while the Doctor's control over his emotions was stronger than that of his granddaughter, who was staring at the screen with curiosity and horror at the same time, Ian knew the same emotions were being felt with great intensity in the old man.

"Why aren't they moving?" Barbara asked.

Her question snapped Susan out of her stupor and she studied the readouts on the console. The girl's expression became more and more horrified. "Grandfather, the TARDIS is picking up enormous damage to the fabric of time and space out there; it's even extended into the Time Vortex," Susan reported, but she shook her head. "It's impossible to tell just how much, and how far backwards and forwards into time this extends to; the TARDIS is still shaken by the turbulence during our arrival, but even without it, the Vortex appears to be too heavily damaged for the TARDIS to get an accurate scan of the damage."

"So we have no idea just how bad it is," Barbara commented.

"Right. But," Susan glanced at her grandfather with worry and fear on her face, "I don't understand, Grandfather. Why aren't….they….getting involved?"

Ian and Barbara both watched in concern, curiosity, and trepidation when the same expression Susan was wearing appeared on the Doctor's face.

"Who's they?" Ian asked curiously.

Unsurprisingly both the Doctor and Susan ignored them while the older looking man turned to Susan, his face troubled. "I am not sure, my child," the old man said quietly; clearly he wanted to keep whatever was being said between himself and Susan strictly between them, and that antagonised Ian. "This sort of damage should have brought them here, to this point in history. And yet it appears they are not here."

"I don't like this, grandfather," Susan hissed desperately. "You know as well as I do our people won't ignore this temporal damage for long, and the longer we are here, the easier it would be for them to-."

"We can't leave just yet, Susan," the Doctor interrupted but Ian and Barbara both had the same shared thought the Doctor had interrupted Susan only to stop her finishing her train of thought, and they both wondered why the Doctor did that. Neither of them knew anything about the civilisation the Doctor and Susan came from, but it was obvious to them both whoever they were, they were highly advanced, and if the implications were clear, it sounded like the Doctor and Susan had both willingly left their people and would get into trouble with them if they were both caught.

Ian remembered the speech the Doctor had given to himself and Barbara on a fateful night in Totter's Yard when he and Barbara had both followed Susan back to the TARDIS, about how they'd been both cut off from their civilisation. Maybe it was partially true, Ian had no idea. But one thing he did know; they were both terrified of their people finding them, and it made him wonder if either of them would be straight.

"I know," Susan snapped Ian out of his thoughts. "We would just experience the same turbulence in the Time Vortex like we had done when we arrived."

"And there is no telling what would have if we left, Susan," the Doctor pointed out to her, "don't forget, materialising in this type of disruption is one thing, dematerialising could be something else. Is there anything else the TARDIS is picking up about the local space/time?"

Susan turned around and checked the controls. She nodded. "The TARDIS is definitely recovering from the roughness caused by the damage to the Vortex, grandfather," she commented, looking at the console relieved. It disappeared quickly when she studied the readouts. "There're traces of _artron energy _nearby."

"Artron energy?" Ian pronounced the name curiously.

The Doctor lifted his gaze, his expression unreadable to the two humans. "It's the same temporal energy the TARDIS uses to travel through time," he explained shortly, his stiff posture and pinched expression making it lear to Ian, who was wiser than the version who had blundered his way into the TARDIS because of his curiosity about Susan, that he had no intention of clarifying anything. If there was one thing he had learnt during his time travelling with the Doctor and with Susan, it was when the Doctor had made his mind up about a topic, the discussion was over.

In the meantime, the Doctor was studying the console himself. "It seems clear to me, the damage done to local time and space would have the same effect on you two, Chesterton and Barbara. So we shall have to rig some kind of protection for you both, and for us as well."

"Do you think the damage is that strong, grandfather?" Susan asked worriedly.

"I think it would be best not to underestimate the situation, my dear. Ordinarily, you and I could probably survive without any ill effects, even though the Time Winds would not be…healthy in the long run, however, I do not think it prudent to leave the TARDIS without adequate protection," the Doctor said seriously.

"Why, what could happen if we're unprotected?" Barbara asked hesitantly.

"Time Winds are like the tides of a sea, Miss Wright," the Doctor replied solemnly. "However, depending on the conditions, the effects vary. In this case, I am uncertain of what could happen; since you and Chesterton have travelled with us, protected by the TARDIS, you might have some degree of protection. Unfortunately, you might end up like the people outside. They are currently frozen in a different time stream. That is why you need to be protected."

Ian glanced at the scanner, wondering if, in a different dimension, they were still moving. He wondered what they were thinking if that was the case.

XXX

As Ian fingered the weighty device the Doctor and Susan had cobbled together using parts from the TARDIS, which the Doctor described as a _"temporal stabiliser," _he couldn't help but ask himself what this latest disaster was all about. While the silence uncomfortably reminded him of Skaro's petrified jungle, and the island of glass on Marinus, Ian was unsettled that this was on Earth and not some bizarre alien world.

Ever since they had left the TARDIS, the time travellers had walked along the streets, all of them concerned and disturbed by the way everything was frozen in time, but blended with different eras.

Ian almost didn't react at all when he saw the small group of soldiers and airmen common from the last war, dressed in their uniforms and carrying rifles and their green bags with their helmets slung over them, but he did react when he caught sight of a small slim black device pressed against a tall young man who physically must have been around Susan's age with clean skin and studded ears with spiky hair. Ian examined the device, but because the other man had the device pressed in the ear, it was hard for Ian to touch it.

"What's this?" he asked.

Susan walked over and gave it a glance. "That is a smartphone," she said.

"SUSAN, CHESTERTON, QUICK RUN-!"

"DELETE!" Ian's blood chilled when he heard the monotonous sound of a computer-like voice, and he rushed in the direction of the voice, and he found the Doctor and Barbara being cornered by a silver armoured giant, like an alien knight. The creature was moving towards them threateningly.

"You will become like us!" the creature chanted, and then suddenly it became still.

"What was that?" Barbara demanded loudly, her eyes showing how terrified she was of the giant.

"It was a Cyberman - they were created on a world like yours, and they discovered their race was becoming weak, so they restructured themselves by using technology until they removed the emotions because they hurt," the Doctor explained.

"What was it doing here?" Susan asked.

"I think it was part of an invasion force to Earth at some point," the Doctor replied thoughtfully and he looked around warily for any more aliens. "I think we should go; the longer we're here, the easier it will be for us to be attacked again."

The Doctor pulled a small dark silver device from his pocket but he held it in a way that Ian couldn't see the details. "The source of the time distortion is coming from that direction," he said.

"We're heading for it?" Barbara asked as she and Ian both realised this was the first time they'd heard of the plan. But Ian was annoyed and frustrated that once more the Doctor was leaving him and Barbara out of the loop, treating them both as if they were retarded or stupid children who were ignorant of what was happening around them.

"Quite so," the old man said, seemingly oblivious to Ian's mood, although the schoolteacher wasn't entirely fooled since the Doctor had admitted before that mystery of the Sensorites had unfolded around them the Doctor and Susan were both capable of reading minds to a degree.

"When were you going to tell us?" Ian demanded, and he walked over and pulled the Doctor around and levelled the glare straight into the old man's eyes.

The Doctor winced a little as he felt the grip around his arm. He was about to demand he let go, but he took a look into Ian's angry face and he sighed mentally when a ghost of the humans' thoughts entered his consciousness. His relationship with the two schoolteachers was improving, but the Doctor was still locked in the same mindset of the typical Time Lord even though he was getting better. He wasn't perfect, not by any means, but he knew he needed to stop making snap decisions without consulting the others even if it went against his nature. "I am sorry, Ian," he replied genuinely. "But I wasn't thinking," he confessed, something which surprised everyone, including Susan herself. "My mind was on trying to work out what caused all of this…this chaos," the Doctor gestured around him, encompassing the streets full of frozen people from different eras.

Ian was silent as he listened to the Doctor. He could accept what the older time traveller was saying to him of course, and it made a lot of sense that he would be more concerned with what was happening rather than expend the time needed to discuss with them his plans. "Have you…have you worked out what's happened, yet, Doctor?" Ian asked softly, slowly letting go of the other man with the apology already in his gaze.

The Doctor sighed. "No, not yet. There are so many possibilities, but I am hoping we can solve it on our own. If we can't…others will need to be brought in. Come on. We need to go."

The Doctor and Susan hurried off, leaving Ian and Barbara behind.

Barbara was watching the Doctor and Susan closely. From where they were, she could tell the two were having a very intense discussion. "What do you think that was about?" she asked quietly.

"I don't know, but whatever it means, it is big," Ian replied, eyeing his increasingly distant friends shrewdly. "I think the Doctor was speaking about his people, and I think the Doctor and Susan would get into…trouble with them if they were ever caught."

XXX

It had been a long time since either Ian or Barbara had been in an Underground station, but the moment they passed through into Morden Underground station they had trouble believing what they were seeing. The ticket office was a mish-mash of machinery Ian couldn't even begin to fathom and what he and Barbara were used to, the sight of human beings issuing tickets, only these people were as still as the other people out there in the street.

The Doctor and Susan, both of them quiet now, passed through the station and down to the three platforms which had trains in them, but there was a strange warping to the trains which seemed to blend the carriages until they were completely different.

Ian took another look and found one of the carriages was red, like the ones he was familiar with, but the next train up was silvery grey and had a similar design to the previous type, but the next carriage was multicoloured white, blue and red with raised red doors.

"This is the centre of the time distortion?" Barbara said, looking startled as soon as she asked the question since she was the only one speaking.

"Yes," the Doctor replied, taking a look at his scanner. "This is the centre of the distortion; you can't see it, but Susan and I can."

"How?"

"As time sensitives, its a gift, or a curse. There are cracks throughout this station, spilling over into different times and places," the Doctor looked solemnly around.

"And those cracks are getting wider and bigger as the explosion goes on."

Ian swung around as a woman appeared wearing a long dark green coat over a red dress. She wasn't particularly tall, with dark brown hair with blonde highlights entwined within it.

"How can this be?" the Doctor asked. "Who are you? You seem familiar."

The woman snorted. "Honestly. Are we always this slow?"

"We?"

"Grandfather," Susan said slowly, shaking her head as she stared wide-eyed at the woman, who suddenly smiled at her with a warmth Ian and Barbara didn't expect. "She's…," Susan shook her head again as if whatever she was about was unbelievable to her.

"She's what, child?"

"Oh come on, figure it out," the woman snapped impatiently, glaring at the Doctor irritated. "You know humans can't survive in this environment - oh, good to see you Ian, and you too Barbara - but Time Lords can."

The Doctor stiffened. "You are a Time Lord?"

"I'm more than that," the woman replied. "I am you, from your future. You are the First Doctor, I am the Third Doctor."


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who or the Twilight Zone.

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A Nexus of Strangeness.

For a moment there was silence following the woman's incredible - and unbelievable - statement. Barbara and Ian looked between the woman and the Doctor - the old man and both wondered what was going on. Both of them had seen many strange things since they had left their time when the Doctor had kidnapped them from 1963, but they had a hard time believing this woman and the Doctor were the same individual even if they didn't have trouble accepting that on other worlds changing gender was possible considering there were many advanced technologies out there.

"I do not believe you, my dear," the Doctor said haughtily, although Ian and Barbara could see the clear uncertainty which gave him away. "You may be a Time Lord, but to break the first law of Time, I don't believe it is possible or feasible it is me that would break it…."

"Normally I wouldn't; I've had two previous lives, one of them you, and I've got ten more incarnations left out there somewhere swirling in and out of our timeline, so the last thing I want is to meet any of them anytime soon, particularly _you," _the woman spat with distaste that worried Susan and intrigued Barbara, "but at this point, the Blinovitch Limitation Effect is a moot point, with time so badly damaged here," the woman sighed and she pulled something out of an inner pocket and held out a round dark silver object with some kind of glowing gauge on it. "In any case, I've got this. A paradox shield," she explained. "It keeps me from freezing like everyone out there and in this station. It converts the temporal energy surrounding me into a protective barrier, and it also probably cancels out the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. But I am you."

"You can't be," the Doctor snapped obstinately.

"Why do you say that? You know even with the Time Lords out there keeping the status quo and preventing paradoxes, it is possible. After all, why else would TARDISes be fitted with a system where memories would be isolated if the pilots encountered a future version of them? Why would Time Lords forget the events of meeting a future incarnation so they wouldn't recall anything so when they came to be that incarnation they wouldn't be forewarned?"

"I would never break the Laws of Time and meet myself, therefore you cannot be me. I cannot imagine that occurring in any future regeneration-," the Doctor said.

The woman let out a stifled scream of frustration. "Oh, for goodness sake! Are we really this stupid? You, the Time Lord who believes himself to be our people's version of Sherlock Holmes "

The Doctor pulled himself up as the insult penetrated. "How dare-?!" he stopped and gaped at the woman as she forcibly touched his mind.

"Contact!" the woman closed her eyes for a second.

Ian and Barbara watched with anxious curiosity as the Doctor did the same, murmuring "Contact" himself, but they didn't realise what was happening, and they became even more concerned when Susan did the same thing.

Unknown to the two human schoolteachers, Susan and the First Doctor were shown memories of the woman's life. The woman showed the pair of them the memory of their escape from Gallifrey in the TARDIS, and some of their earliest journeys in time and space while trying to evade Gallifrey so they wouldn't be caught. As they were shown the memories, Susan and her grandfather began to accept the woman was a future incarnation of the Doctor, although the old Doctor was still sceptical. All that changed as the memories progressed and the woman showed them other memories - of the First Doctor's regeneration in the TARDIS, and then later the second Doctor's regeneration before they saw that Doctor become the woman she was now.

But at the same time Susan, who was naturally gifted with telepathy and Mental Communication theory, couldn't help but notice that some of the memories were glossed over, but she didn't do anything about it or mention it since it was common for Time Lords who met their future incarnations to forget about it, so when they became that incarnation in their own timeline they wouldn't be forewarned.

Susan didn't have any trouble identifying this Doctor as a future incarnation of her grandfather. It wasn't as though she were disguising her mental presence from them, and yet she had to be exasperated by her grandfather's first self for being so stubborn to deny the possibility.

When the connection was broken the old Doctor stared open-mouthed at his future self. "You…you really are me," he whispered.

"Yes," the woman - the female Doctor - replied, looking back at her younger self unhappily, although she visibly looked like she wanted to say something more than what she had said and only just resisted the urge, "I'm just as thrilled as you are."

Barbara stepped forwards. "Are you…really the Doctor?" she asked the woman; after all her experience with time travel and the way the Doctor and Susan were acting, she could tell this wasn't a joke, and she knew the strange grandfather and granddaughter well enough to know they wouldn't go along with such a joke. Ever.

The woman's unhappy face brightened in a smile. "Hello, Barbara," she said with such familiarity that seemed to only come with two people who were dear friends, even if Barbara had never ever seen this woman in her life. "It's been a very long time. And answering your question, yes I am the Doctor."

"But how…is this possible? I mean you aren't….a-?" Ian stumbled as he tried to find a polite way of asking a question which would otherwise be very offensive

The woman - the _female Doctor - _just smirked back at Ian. "A man?" she finished with an amused giggle. "It's perfectly simple, Ian. Time Lords, such as myself, have the ability to regenerate our bodies when we've suffered a terrible injury or exposed to a devastating amount of damage. All organs are replaced, our bone structures change. We can change our heights, our weights, our appearances. Even our genders can change, although the adjustment period can take a while since it's hard to adjust to a gender opposite the one you were originally born into. Trust me, I speak from experience; it took me months to adapt to my new body. Our bodies can do this twelve times, giving us thirteen lives. But at the same time, our personalities could shift. The Doctor you travel with is our first incarnation, I am the third Doctor as I said."

"But what are you doing here?" Susan asked, looking uncertainly at the female Doctor.

The female Doctor smiled warmly at Susan. "Hello, Susan," she said, although Barbara could see the smile was sad and she was willing to bet Susan could see it as well, "It's great to see you again."

"Again? You mean…I'm not with you anymore?" Susan asked uncertainly.

The female Doctor sighed. "You….moved on. Everyone does eventually. You see, I know you always wanted to have a home, a proper home, and never keep travelling for the rest of your life. In any case, you had to find your own way eventually. I can't say anymore, you know that; this mess is complex enough without you knowing too much of your own future."

"Erm, alright," Susan looked uncertainly between the female Doctor and the Doctor she knew best, although she seemed to understand what was being told.

"Why are you here?" Ian asked.

The female Doctor seemed to hesitate at the question. "I was already on Earth when the disaster struck; I don't know _why _it happened, but I do know what caused it."

"You do? You're able to do that?" Ian asked uncertainly.

"Oh yes. I was able to use my version of the TARDIS to scan it. In the epicentre of the explosion, destroyed, and still being destroyed, is another TARDIS," the female Doctor said.

"Another TARDIS?" the Doctor Ian knew best repeated in surprise.

"Yes, believe me; I have no idea how it got here. I don't know if our people were decommissioning it and had managed to de-energise it although not enough to stop it leaving our planet, I know a total event collapse hasn't taken place," the female Doctor said grimly.

"A total what?" Ian said, noticing the reactions between Susan and the Doctor he and Barbara knew best.

"A total event collapse. All TARDISes contain a copy of our planet's power source which channels energy through the Time Vortex. Our power source is a frozen star on the cusp of becoming a black hole - a collapsed star which has lost all of its nuclear fuel and gravity has crushed it in and in until there is no escape, but we harness the potential collapse. If a total event collapse occurs when all the temporal energy in the TARDIS burns at every point in time and space at the same moment, destroying everything in its path," Susan said, looking horrified by the concept.

Ian and Barbara glanced at each other in worry; they didn't know just how powerful it was, but they could tell it must have been powerful if it garnered this reaction.

The female Doctor shook her head. "I don't think there's enough time energy inside that TARDIS for that, Susan. But even if it doesn't, it's still a danger. It's shattered time in this timezone, both past and forward directions in the vortex, blending them all together. The effects are everywhere in the streets, and in this station."

"You mean the trains and the different appearances of the station?" Ian glanced around, picking out the different train designs and the differently dressed people.

"Exactly," the female Doctor nodded. "There's also a danger of alternate timelines being created in the shatter effect. So we really need to sort this out, and quickly."

"Is that..bad?" Barbara asked.

"Yes. Alternate timelines are essentially tracts of the main universe; their presence can threaten the lifespan of the universe itself," the female Doctor replied.

The old Doctor looked pointedly at his future self. He had been silent for a while now, staring at his female self for a while, wondering to himself what would make him choose a female body. He had nothing against the diversity; in fact, in his younger years, particularly when he had heard and met the Corsair, the Doctor had actually considered regenerating into a female body once or twice, but as he grew older and his fears of regeneration had grown he had placed those plans to the side, but the idea was still there.

But right now he had a lot more on his mind than the choices of his future incarnations. "What else do you know of this?" he asked.

The female Doctor turned to her younger self. Inwardly she was exasperated by her other self's suspicion, and she knew her presence on Earth had caught his interest. "Not a lot. When the damage to time and space occurred and my TARDIS registered it, I scanned the Time Vortex; I saw this TARDIS crash right in the 1950s and explode. I don't know if an inexperienced Time Lord was piloting it, or if it was stolen by somebody else and piloted haphazardly until the inevitable occurred because they did something unbelievably stupid with it. All I know is time is heavily damaged as you, Susan and I can see."

"Hmm," the old Doctor replied, looking around the station with concern. Susan was more open with her fear as she looked around in a manner that reminded Barbara of a child trying hard to be meek and small.

Ian saw it too, and he turned to the female Doctor. "What do you mean, see?"

"Time Lord is more than just a title," the female Doctor explained solemnly. "We are time-sensitive; we can perceive moments where history has been damaged, and it's wired into our being to repair the damage. We can see other things as well, but right now all we can see is time is badly damaged. It's like we are surrounded by cracks which bleed out both the past and the future. We can hear and see the speeches made by many of the leaders of the Romans, the cries of dinosaurs across different points in prehistoric Earth, and we can also do the same with the future.

"Right now, time is badly damaged. And we need to fix it," the female Doctor finished.


	4. Chapter 4

I own nothing. I hope everyone is safe from the virus.

Enjoy.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

A Nexus of Strangeness.

Nathaniel blinked as he stepped out of the time portal before he checked his vortex manipulator to make sure the paradox field remained stable while Sally closed the vortex hole they'd used to get to this point of the C-20th. But while he checked his vortex manipulator, Nathaniel blew out a breath of awe at the size - and devastation - of the temporal shatter point.

Nathaniel had been a member of the Time Agency for a long time now, but he had never seen anything like this. He and his partner had, of course, been briefed about the damage which had thrown the Agency's temporal viewing suites into disarray due to the sheer size of the damage and how the Time Vortex was so warped past and future had been blended together, but sadly enough the Agency's sensors were just too ineffective to properly scan the anomaly without going in close.

Sally turned to him once she was finished closing the vortex hole, the Ko tattoo on the right side of her otherwise cold face vivid against her pale skin. "How big is it?" she asked.

"Large. It's already reached the early years of the 24th century," Nathaniel replied, hoping that they weren't going to encounter any of the more exotic creatures you found in time - the Time Agency had heard rumours, myths and legends of beings like the Reapers who were said to emerge from time like bacteria sterilising a wound, but if they encountered the Chronovores they'd be out of their depth.

Sally looked around herself, glancing at her own manipulator to make sure the paradox shield she had was protecting her from the worst of the effects. At the same time, she took note of what was around them. "It looks like some form of Cyberman over there," she commented calmly, although Nathaniel knew her well enough to be aware she was prepared to kill it.

"Nestene Autons, Daleks, and Ice Warriors, and Sontarans from different eras, too," Nathaniel added, looking around while he noted the different assortment of aliens, discounting the various members of his own race who likewise came from different times in Earth's history. It was odd, being here like this, seeing all of those hostile lifeforms here reminded him of the synth museum he had attended many times as a kid, but seeing them here was nothing like those far-flung days.

He knew these were real, and he was prepared to fight himself, even though he had no idea if anything they did would have any lasting effect with them being frozen in time.

"Come on," he said. "We'd better go on; we're not that far from the epicentre."

"Why did you want us to arrive so far out?" Sally asked as they went on ahead, Nathaniel's manipulator set to scan the anomaly for scientific purposes and to show them the right way. Sally had been mystified by the reasoning behind Nathaniel's decision to open the portal so far out of the centre of the explosion instead of opening one closer to it.

"I didn't know if the anomaly's effects would affect the portal, and don't forget we had a hard time stabilising it. I've seen dozens of these anomalies, Sally, dozens. If there's one thing I've learnt about temporal phenomena, it's you don't get too close," Nathaniel replied without turning around once, inwardly shaking his head.

Sally was a rookie. She hadn't been in the Time Agency for a long time, and as a result, there was so much she didn't understand about time travel. She had been given to Nathaniel to teach the ropes to, and she still had so much to learn, but sometimes Nathaniel wondered if she had part of her brain replaced by a computer which regularly dumped half of its memory to save space; he must have told her about a dozen times by now about the weird effects of temporal paradoxes, and she still had trouble taking it all in.

They were soon walking down the street - Nathaniel ignored the signs of litter; humans, no matter what the age, were pretty dirty, and thanks to his trips to the past he had grown accustomed to the sights, but Sally was still new, and he was sure this was the first time she had ever come this far back in time.

"Is that an early anti-grav car?" Sally pointed to the vehicle in question.

Nathaniel scoffed. "Hardly. It doesn't fly, it just trundles around on four wheels."

"Primitive."

"Every culture advances, but even ours needed to take baby steps," Nathaniel agreed while they were passing a blue box on the street. Nathaniel almost walked straight past it, but his manipulator went off with a sharp series of bleeps. Surprised by the sudden interruption, Nathaniel checked his manipulator, wondering if the temporal damage had gotten to it although it shouldn't have considering the amount of scientific work had gone into developing the Agency's time-travel technology.

"What's wrong with it?" Sally asked.

"I don't know," Nathaniel replied, still examining the manipulator to get an accurate answer. "I had thought - Ahh, got it!" he cheered, mentally happy that he didn't need to repeat his thoughts to his partner, and he checked the manipulator.

Sally looked on, and she was very surprised when she saw her partner's expression shift was the happiness he had gotten his manipulator working properly again to surprise and then a weird mix of outright shock and awe.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I never imagined I would meet one," Nathaniel said, seemingly not hearing her question while he turned around and examined the blue box they were standing near. Sally watched him and turned her own attention to the box. There was nothing extraordinary about it in her mind, it was about the size of a transmat booth or a teleport portal with a lamp on top.

But there were words as well, reading POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX.

She shrugged, clueless. "What's so special about the box, Nathaniel?"

"Oh, it doesn't look special, but believe me when I say it is. Sally, what do you know about the Time Lords?"

XXX

"Are you insane? If we call the Time Lords in, we will get caught!" Susan said to the third incarnation of her grandfather, unable to believe what she had just said. "After all the trouble we went through, just to leave…," she went on, trailing off at the end.

Susan had never wanted to really leave Gallifrey in the first place. She had only just been entered into the Time Lord Academy back home by the time her grandfather had led her away and hadn't even explained to her his plan to leave Gallifrey until they were inside the TARDIS they used to escape in.

Susan had been more than willing to be with her grandfather, yes. But if she'd had her own way, they would not have left until they were ready, but then again her grandfather had always been a law unto himself, and he hadn't stopped to consider what Susan might have wanted growing up. It was a truth Susan had never once revealed to him, for she loved the Doctor a great deal, but at the same time, a part of her resented the fact he had taken her from her world without considering what she might have wanted out of life.

Susan looked up when she felt the female Doctor place a gentle hand on her shoulder. There was a probing expression there which made Susan wonder if she was broadcasting her thoughts, and she instinctively slammed down her telepathic barriers to prevent either Doctor from knowing what was in their mind. She had no idea how her grandfather's third incarnation would take it, but she knew the incarnation she travelled with would be hurt she hadn't wanted to travel away from Gallifrey as he had. Her suspicion and worry the Third Doctor had heard the broadcasted thoughts were confirmed when she spotted the unimpressed but slightly hurt look that was in her face, and she felt guilty.

"I am not saying we should contact them now, right away, and you would have worked that out if you had bothered to listen to me instead of going off like that," the female Doctor replied, looking at Susan with a soft smile that told Susan she was trying hard to keep her hurt bottled up, but they would talk about it later. "I'm just saying we might have to consider contacting them in the future for some degree of help."

"As Susan said, we can't bring them in," the First Doctor interrupted, looking pointedly at his future self with an expression Ian and Barbara both recognised as annoyed as well as incredulous the female Doctor would even think of suggesting such a course of action. The two schoolteachers had both remained out of the conversation which had spiralled down into an argument because they were both out of their depth, and they didn't understand the problem even if the Time Lords were giving them a good idea of what was wrong. "If they catch us-."

The Doctor closed her eyes with irritation. She had had enough of this argument. It had started when she and her first incarnation had brainstormed a few ideas of how they could deal with this problem with some help from Susan even if their granddaughter had a limited amount of knowledge of temporal mechanics. But the discussion had gone out of control really fast. It was mostly because her first incarnation was too cautious - oh, how she sometimes yearned for the days where all her concerns were just travelling the universe and seeing the sights while keeping on the move to keep off of Gallifrey's radar while keeping Susan safe - to really take any major risk, and while she had needed to keep that in mind, the Doctor in her current life no longer saw the problem not going the extra mile.

"They already have caught us," she said, shocking the First Doctor and Susan into silence, and she sighed in frustration. So much for keeping secret her exile.

"What?" the First Doctor demanded, glaring at her although they could all see he was shaken by this news.

The Doctor glared back at him - he might be able to play this sort of game with the Monk, but not with her, not with another incarnation. "The Time Lords caught me a regeneration back," she said, knowing she was breaking the first law of time, but since she had every intention in her mind to go into her first self's sorry excuse for a TARDIS and making sure the memories of her first self and Susan were blocked, while doing the same thing to Ian and Barbara….actually on second thought, the TARDIS was unreliable, and the chances of her being able to make the memory block work was insurmountable.

Still, she would find a way of getting inside the TARDIS and checking the relevant system. The TARDIS may have been punished along with her in preparation for the exile, but she was still Time Lord to the core. The Laws of Time would be laid into her very structure, but the Doctor planned to make sure Susan and her original self did not leave here with any future knowledge. She hadn't even planned on revealing anything when she had realised they were here in the first place, but she had decided just to get it out so then they had a good idea of what was going on with her.

Her expression became more solemn and sad as she began pacing the platform slowly. "The Time Lords have exiled me to Earth, to the 20th century. They've placed an inhibitor in the TARDIS. To make matters worse, they've taken my knowledge of how to properly repair the console so I can have my freedom restored."

"How did this happen?" Susan asked, shocked by the announcement while Ian and Barbara looked at each other.

"Lets just say I found myself in a major crisis I couldn't solve on my own and I quickly found myself out of my depth with no other option but to call the Time Lords in," the Doctor replied, refusing to even think of that difficult moment of uncertainty she'd had to face in the aftermath of ending the War Games when she had discovered the ace in the hole which were Magnus' SIDRATs was non-existent, and the terrible truth she had been left with, and also refusing to even tell her original incarnation and Susan about what was in the future.

"Excuse me for a moment, Doctor - _Doctors," _Ian interrupted, looking between the two different versions of the same individual although all three Time Lords in the station could tell he was still sceptical about the female Doctor's identity, "but why were you put on trial in the first place?"

"Basically….I'm a renegade Time Lord," the Doctor replied with a shrug. "I had several reasons for you to take your pick; I was an anarchist who despised the government at the time, hating their never-ending backstabbing.… I discovered a few things about Time Lord society that made me run from home. But one of the biggest reasons was because I just wanted to get out, explore the cosmos. I stole the TARDIS and went out, but when I met you and Barbara, I'd been content to keep my head down, and just observe without getting involved. But," she shrugged, "that didn't work, did it? When the Time Lords caught me, they used it against me in the trial. I used my experiences with the aliens I'd met and fought over time, and I gave them a speech describing the evils I'd fought in the universe; the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Yeti and the Great Intelligence, the Quarks who are the robotic soldiers of the Dominators, and the Ice Warriors. I still don't know what made the Time Lords show me mercy; exile is far more better than being dematerialised."

"Oh no," Susan gasped, making Barbara look at her worriedly.

"But…isn't that what we do in the TARDIS anyway?" she asked.

"In this context, no," Susan shook her head, looking grimly at her former schoolteacher. "Dematerialisation in this case is the most severest punishment the Time Lords can ever pass. It erases you from history itself."

"Oh," Barbara couldn't find anything else to say in response to his, and a part of her wondered what it would be like to have never existed, and then she decided she did not want to know.

"The Time Lords have policy of non-intervention in the affairs of others," the Doctor went on to make Ian and Barbara both see what the point was, "and when I met you, I had no intention of meddling at all. But after a while, it became second nature, and the Time Lords did not take kindly to that. A friend who was travelling with me at the time pointed out I helped people, but the Time Lords don't care about that. It's just an excuse, and in any case, it doesn't really matter at this point, does it? The longer we talk, the more damage this destroyed TARDIS is going to cause."

"Quite right, my dear," the First Doctor replied, "quite right. Now-,"

The First Doctor was about to expand on an idea he had in mind, but before he could do so the station shifted as time seemed to accelerate into the future, while the structure of it remained the same, some of the little details changed like the logo and the Way Out signs changed, and new machines appeared while the people themselves changed as well.

Ian had to step out of the way of the crowd, separated from the others as people boarded one of the more futuristic-looking Tube trains, some of them holding onto small portable telephones as they went, but the strangest thing was as he watched the people coming and going down the steps leading up to street level were ghostly, while the ones coming down the stairs became more solid.

As they went past him, completely ignoring his presence, Ian overheard a few of them talking about something called 'Brexit' and he also saw a few people wearing similar clothes with what looked like white face masks on their faces. Ian watched them mystified, wondering what that was all about before he caught sight of a newspaper headline about something called the coronavirus.

Suddenly everything became still.

"Why does that happen?" Barbara asked suddenly, her question turned towards the Doctor they travelled with.

"Mm?" the First Doctor replied, looking at her in confusion.

"Why does time start up again and then it stops?" Barbara clarified her question.

"It's because of the TARDIS engines; they are still pulsing with energy. Every once in awhile the pulses will ripple through the local time, causing this effect. Try to imagine one of the cars in your time trying to overcome a hill while the driver is pushing down on the accelerator, and more speed is generated," the First Doctor replied, his expression grave as he looked around the station. "However, in this case, the TARDIS is trying to both avoid and break out of the explosion. TARDISes are designed to never get trapped in a paradox, and its second nature for them to try to break free while they loop their engines around to force themselves out. Unfortunately, in this case, the engines are causing more damage."

"Damage? How?"

"Time is still shattered," the Doctor explained grimly, interrupting the conversation smoothly. "And the engine pulses of the damaged TARDIS are pressing more and more against the fabric of time. If this continues, we won't have anything to repair."

"Is there nothing we can do?" Susan asked her grandfather's third incarnation.

"Not from here, sadly," the Doctor shook her head, biting her lip thoughtfully as she racked her brain for inspiration. "The TARDIS is temporally displaced, so we can't reach….wait a minute, I might have an idea," she said as a thought popped into her brain, and she reached into her inner jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like a strange tube with a circular head with a yellow and black band on it.

"What is that?" the First Doctor asked, looking curiously at the tube.

"A sonic screwdriver. This is the latest model, and I've made it from bits of my TARDIS. If I can make a few changes to the settings," the Doctor broke off as she made the right changes to the screwdriver, "I can give the TARDIS something to home in on, and if we can get inside, then you and I can figure out a way of stopping the damage and reversing it," she said to her original self.

"Mm, it is possible," the First Doctor commented, tapping his chin thoughtfully before he looked up at his future self. "Will you need to wait until the engine's pulse again?"

"No. I'm not doing that," the Doctor held up the sonic screwdriver and pointed it at a particular point in the station. She triggered the screwdriver, surprising the others with the high-pitched whine. She kept it going for a few minutes before she stopped. "That should do it."

"But the TARDIS isn't here," Ian pointed out.

"I know, but I gave its sensors something to lock on to, letting it know we're here. By now it will be trying to…Ah, here it comes," she broke off with a smile on her face when they heard the familiar wheezing, groaning sound, but it sounded off.

The Doctor triggered her sonic screwdriver again. "Come on," she said to the thin air where the TARDIS sound was coming from, "stabilise your engines….recalibrate them….," she said as the TARDIS began to appear, but it flickered in and out as it materialised. "Oh come on, please!" she begged. "I'm giving you something to lock onto…"

The Doctor suddenly screamed in shock as she felt something hit her hand, and she dropped the sonic screwdriver in shock before she clutched her hand which now felt numb.

She turned around and she saw two people, a tall man who looked weathered, while next to him was a smaller, younger woman with short shining hair with a tattoo on her face; the Doctor might not have visited that particular world, but she recognised a Ko tattoo when she saw one. Both of them wore jackets which reminded her slightly of the uniforms of the Royal Navy from the 18th century.

"What on Earth-!?" Barbara began, but she was stopped when the woman pointed a snug nosed gun at her, shutting the schoolteacher up instantly.

"None of that. Now, raise your hands! You are now under arrest by the order of the Time Agency!" the man said crisply.

_Rassilon, I'd wondered how bad things could get, _the Doctor thought to herself while she flexed her hand to get some feeling back into it, _I should have kept my mental voice shut!_


	5. Chapter 5

As usual, I own nothing.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

A Nexus of Strangeness.

Her hand aching, the Doctor glared at the two Time Agents. "I know I am going to regret this, but anyway…why are you two here?" she ground out, although a part of her wondered why she was asking something so stupid.

"That is none of your damn business," the female Time Agent snapped, holding her weapon up threateningly.

"Oh, but I think it is," the Doctor retorted angrily, keeping herself between the Time Agents and her original self and his companions; the last thing she wanted to be was for these two careless time meddlers to realise she and the old idiot behind her were one and the same. "Don't you realise you've just stopped my attempt to stabilise the time machine that is trapped inside the temporal anomaly?" she pressed on angrily.

"Is that what you were doing?" the male Time Agent asked.

"Yes, it was," the Doctor replied.

She wasn't surprised they had gotten the wrong end of the stick. The problem with Time Agents was they were like inter-temporal police who had become corrupt as time went on, but at their core, they believed anything suspicious was inherently dangerous and hostile. So, for them, a Time Agent could wander down a simple street and spot a child sucking a sweet. For an ordinary person, that child sucking a sweet would be innocent with the only damage being done to the child's teeth.

A Time Agent, on the other hand, would go for their weapon and lunge for the child, thinking they were about to trigger an explosion which would destroy an entire planet. The most incredible thing about the Time Agency was they had no idea of how inherently ignorant they were. It was as if entering their organisation removed all traces of their intelligence and their common sense. They were so taken in with the newfound power they had at their disposal that they did whatever they wished without stopping and asking themselves if they should.

"How do we know that? From what we know of your kind, you believe you know everything there is to know about time travel and its dangers."

"What do you mean, my kind?" the Doctor replied, sending a telepathic command to her first self and Susan to let her do the talking, but knowing of her first self and his pomposity, she knew it was a lost cause.

"I scanned you when we arrived," the male Agent replied, holding his wrist up, revealing the Vortex Manipulator. "Two hearts, binary vascular system, a host of other things that is rare to find in intelligent races. You are a Time Lord, aren't you?"

"Yes, well some races are more evolved than humans, not just Time Lords," the Doctor replied before she shook her head, biting back the many insults she had for these two and their organisation while she tried to control her worry about what these two imbeciles would do now they knew she was a Time Lord. "Surely, it occurred to you I was trying to stop this, not make it worse?"

"We are here to stop the anomaly as well, but Time Agency HQ needs readings before it can come up with a solution," the male Time Agent said.

"Excuse me," Ian's voice interrupted the little argument, and the Doctor half-turned to watch her first human companion step forward although she hoped he was smart enough to not make any stupid move with these two. "But who are you, and what are Time Agents?"

"The Time Agency is a paramilitary temporal organisation set up in the 47th century," the Doctor explained, pleased at the opportunity to give an explanation while she worked out what she could do about these two so they didn't get in the way. "Their original mandate was to protect the timeline from time meddlers, time active assassins who'd stupidly travel back in time and kill dictators, people like that, without thinking about the long term damage it would cause. Unfortunately, no-one realised that by creating the Agency, they'd eventually become those same time meddlers."

"We protect history-!"

"Only the history you wish to protect," the First Doctor interrupted, seemingly forgetting the warning of his later incarnation or being too outraged to not comment on the matter, making the Doctor wince even if she shared the same view, which wasn't unusual considering they were both the same person, although at two different points in their lives - he was only just free of Gallifrey, she had been caught by the Time Lords and exiled to this dull, dreary little planet.

She sometimes wondered if the humans _actually knew _how dreary their world was, but she doubted it. She suspected it was another human quirk which she had stupidly ignored, and it had only just made her yearn and dream of getting herself a new TARDIS somehow while trying to unlock her knowledge of dematerialisation theory at the same time - she had been keeping watch on Gallifrey, and so she knew they had just released the Type 60 model.

Try as she might, the Doctor simply could not get out of her mind the capabilities of the new Type 60.

A new fluid link injector system, bypassing the frequent irritating problem of fluid link overloads.

A new chameleon circuit design, meaning the circuit didn't need manual programming and had a greater capacity for camouflage.

Improved navigational circuit.

Greater time travel durability, meaning the Type 60 could do things an earlier Type 40 could do, but only better.

Increased security fail-safe security, and a switch which cut off the entire ship.

And those were only five. The Doctor was very fond of her old Type 40 TARDIS, but at this point in her life, she could see she had made several mistakes while she tried and struggled to restore her freedom. The 1950s was in hindsight an awful place in time technologically for her to be stranded in, despite what the humans might think of their science, seeing it as sophisticated because of their discovery of nuclear power. By alien standards, the era was primitive.

She guessed that was one of the reasons why the Time Lords had exiled her here specifically. They knew she would work for a long time to discover a way she could leave Earth.

But since she had begun working on the TARDIS, the Doctor had discovered so many things wrong with the Type 40. Many of them were simple design flaws, and it made her curse her first self for being so rushed she'd stolen the Type 40 before she'd engaged her brain. If she had been more careful, more selective, she knew she would never have trusted that mysterious Time Lady, and taken the Type 40. She would have likely taken a TARDIS she could at least work with, instead of one she struggled with.

_Oh, a new TARDIS. Anything's better than what I've got right now, especially considering all the work I need to do on the systems, _she thought to herself. Maybe she could grab one of them at some point, although preferably when her knowledge of temporal theory and TARDIS mechanics had been released.

Anything was better than being exiled to a planet like Earth again. Why hadn't she stolen one of those newer TARDISes when she had originally left Gallifrey? Okay, so in her first incarnation, she had been arrogant and so sure of herself to the point where she flouted school, and believed herself better than her tutors and her peers, and believed she knew everything when her grades were so beneath those of say, Magnus, the Rani, or even the Master.

But anyway, she was focused on her first self - Time Lord minds, due to their complexity, allowed them to do several things at once. She had focused on her first self and focused on her dream for freedom away from Earth.

Actually, now she was thinking of her freedom, she realised she had a way of getting away from Earth after all, while making sure the Time Lords never came for her again…

But for now, she was left focusing on her younger self. Didn't the fool yet realise when to speak and when to keep his mouth shut? Rassilon, she had only been in his company for an hour now, and he was already reminding her of how much of a jerk he had been. Omega, no wonder her second self had been caught by the Time Lords, thanks to that kind of arrogance and certainty he would never be caught.

Now he'd drawn the Time Agent's interest, they would likely do a bio-scan of him and realise he and her were the same individual, just at different points in their timeline. They wouldn't only have a field day, knowing them they'd go back to the Agency and let them know the Blinovitch Limitation Effect was nothing more than a hoax.

But despite her annoyance with his original incarnation, she knew he had a point. The Time Lords of Gallifrey liked to believe themselves to be the only ones in the universe to have access to time travel. They were wrong, of course - in the universe, there was the unspoken rule or reality; if one person has built something that does this, then it was highly probable somebody had gotten there first.

The Vaadwaur had discovered and mapped out a network of subspace corridors for 900 years in the 12th century, for crying out loud. They had believed themselves the undisputed masters of the domain and were completely unaware that, in four parts of the universe, separated by millions upon millions of light-years, there were four other empires who had discovered the network as well.

Time travel was no different.

Yes, the Time Lords had invented it first, and they had become so good at it they had eventually evolved (and genetically engineered and enhanced themselves, following the creation of the Time Vortex and the Web of Time) to give themselves an awareness of time which went way ahead of anything else. And for billions of years, the Time Lords had relished their domain and mastery of history.

And then came the Temporal Powers. The opinion was divided on where some of them came from (there were rumours after all the Nekkistani had discovered their basic temporal theory by raiding a temporal rift, but she wasn't sure), but the majority of Time Lord scholars believed they had discovered their technology by themselves, gradually becoming more and more proficient in time travel until they had reached the level of the Time Lords themselves. Naturally, the Nekkistani and the Monan Host were both stunned to encounter the existence of a very very old race, who was older than most races in the universe and had the power of time travel that dwarfed their own capabilities, but the Doctor guessed they had already guessed the Time Lords existed since they would have likely gotten wind of the Web's existence. It wasn't hard to find if you knew how to look and knew what to look for.

The good thing was, apart from a bit of hostility, the Time Lords had accepted them almost as equals. Her people's propaganda said they were only being friendly because they were better than lesser species.

The Doctor knew better. She knew her people were only being friendly and open with those races because they knew if there was a major Time War with the Monan Host and the Nekkistani, and all the others on one end, and the Time Lords on the other, the entire stability of the universe would come unravelled, and the Time Lords wouldn't want that.

The Time Agency in comparison was far beneath all of them on the ladder, and if there was one thing all of the Temporal Powers had in common it was outrage and downright contempt for the Time Agency. They were capable of nothing but trouble. 234 separate temporal disasters alone, ranging from carelessly handing over advanced technology to primitive races, which blew them up. Changing history, reversing battles, altering timelines. And that was all in their first year alone!

But the uplifting of primitive races…the Time Lords had been reminded of themselves, back when they had uplifted primitive races, but while the Doctor could see the similarities, she was more than aware of the differences. Her people had wanted to help the Minyans (at least she hoped they had; if she found out the earlier Time Lords had merely given them the keys to their own destruction to make them into a slave race, she would be really angry), the Time Agency had just been careless.

"What do you mean?" Ian turned to the Doctor whom he knew best.

"The assassination of Grand Admiral Pkollox, for example. His assassination changed history; with him dead, a major interstellar incident became a massive war," the First Doctor said, frowning heavily at the two Agents, his disapproval clear.

"That was an accident," the male Time Agent began.

"An accident that wiped out millions, changed not just history but prevented or delayed the First Contact with not only your people but several dozens which altered a vast amount of time, sending shockwaves into the future. Changing events on an intergalactic scale," the Doctor pointed out before she shook her head. "Why is it some people say my people are an ancient power who play games, and yet are pleased to play games with history to amuse themselves? What were you thinking?"

"We were trying to ensure something, but that doesn't matter," the male Time Agent dismissed carelessly. Just seeing him do that made the contempt the Doctor felt for the whole organisation grow stronger, and her disgust with them just increased.

"Just trying to ensure something?" Susan piped up, her voice vibrating with anger as well. "Don't you understand how _dangerous _time meddling is?"

The Doctor shook her head. "If you're trying to appeal to their sense of responsibility, Susan, don't bother. They simply don't have one."

"And what were you doing here, Time Lord? For all we know, you might have been making this whole thing worse?"

As much as the Doctor hated to admit it to herself, she had to admit the Time Agents had a point there; from their perspective, she could have been doing anything with her sonic screwdriver, how were they to know what she was actually doing?

Unwilling to let them see they'd struck a nerve, the Doctor made her voice as gentle as possible. "I was trying to stabilise that time-ship's engines; the longer they remain on, the more they will damage time and space, and what's happening now will get worse. My TARDIS is currently holding the worst of this back, but it won't last. The longer this goes on for, the worse the consequences will be. Now, if you would leave us alone I can stabilise the time-ship trapped in the anomaly and repair the damage."

The Doctor didn't really expect the suggestion to work, so she wasn't surprised that it didn't.

"How do we know you would not make things worse?" the older male Time Agent countered.

"For all, we know you could be trying to create the temporal equivalent of a black hole," the female agreed. "We cannot risk it; our job is to discover the cause of this disaster and to put it right before the causal nexus is unravelled."

The Doctor closed her eyes. The causal nexus of the universe was not going to become unravelled because there was a relatively small hole punched in the universe as a result of the TARDIS crashing, but what annoyed her the most was these two idiots were slowing things down, believing they knew everything they needed to know about time travel.

This type of attitude would have been annoying even if these two were not Time Agents, but what made her want to laugh was how hypocritical they sounded.

These two idiots belonged to an organisation which had been meddling in history since it had been inaugurated, and here they were, telling her they were here to do the job of the Time Lords.

Her plan to stabilise the TARDIS engines was the only one that was achievable with their current resources, but as she thought about it, she realised there was something she could do. She tightened her grip around her sonic screwdriver, and she pressed the switch while she aimed the screwdriver in their basic direction.

The two Time Agents stiffened and then they became still.

Ian looked between the two agents in surprise before he looked around at the Doctor. "What was that?"

"The Time Agents use Vortex Manipulators to move through time," the Doctor explained while she tried to keep a better explanation about how the manipulators worked in case either Ian or Barbara got the idea of using one to return to their own time, something she was determined not to happen since their departure with that Dalek time machine was fixed in her life. "But they have the means of shielding the wearer from the anomaly, only its a lot more basic."

Any further explanations were cut short when time started running once more.


	6. Chapter 6

I do not own Doctor Who or the Twilight Zone. If I did, well the Unbound Doctors would have received a lot more stories to unleash its full potential. I am so sorry I haven't updated this story in a long time, but hopefully, that will change now.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

A Nexus of Strangeness.

_The problem with time travel is the more I see of it, the less I truly understand even when I've seen the effects for myself; and now this. Not only am I meeting a future version of one of my friends who seems more open compared to the Doctor I know, but Barbara and I now know a bit more about the Doctor than ever before, but I never guessed this could happen to time…., _Ian thought to himself as he stepped out of the way of the public as time seemed to be running again.

To his surprise, the trains seemed to be blurring and then they changed to an unpainted silvery colour though many of the carriages were defaced with strange graffiti. And then the trains began blurring once more until they were replaced with more futuristic-looking trains coloured in the red, white, and dark blue colours of the London Underground.

Ian turned to the Doctor - any Doctor - to ask what was going on. He caught the eye of the female Doctor. "Why are the trains changing?" He asked her.

The female Doctor looked around, eyeing each new change with the different yet still familiar curiosity as her other self (Ian made a mental note to ask either Susan or the older Doctor the details of how their people changed their faces), but Ian got the impression although the female Doctor _knew _what was going on, she was surprised to see it happening like this like it was something completely new to her.

"It's the TARDIS engines, Ian. Each time they pulse, time starts up again. Each of those people are locked in a temporal fragment, an anomaly where time moves forwards or backwards. Usually, when it happens, the effect is localised, but since we're dealing with a TARDIS, the effects are much broader on the timeline, and because of that….," the Third Doctor sighed. "Essentially we're outside the fragment, watching as time moves forwards in a blink of an eye. It's the temporal perspective of reading a book. Time is just moving forwards quicker than we can see it."

Barbara stepped towards them. "Look, Doctor," she said to the woman who was apparently an older version of the old man they travelled with - Barbara was still dubious about all that even if she was convinced this woman was the Doctor, she had seen many strange things during her time in the TARDIS, but there was still so much she was having a hard time taking in - when she realised something, "you said earlier your TARDIS was holding back the worst of the effects. What can happen if the TARDIS wasn't doing that?"

"A lot. You have to understand a TARDIS engine is extremely powerful, they need to be since they're traversing the entirety of the universe. TARDIS engines are massive, bigger than anything you could imagine, so in this instance, the damage is very severe," the female Doctor looked at the woman who had at one time in her timeline been one her first human companions. "My TARDIS engines have created a temporal bubble around the whole of Morden to keep the worst of the effects _inside_. And when I say effects I mean the temporal bubble is acting like a plug holding multiple timelines at bay. But outside the bubble, everything is as it should be. That's what drew those two idiots here," she gestured towards the two frozen Time Agents.

"How long will they stay like that?" Ian asked.

"I honestly don't know," the female Doctor replied, not sounding like she particularly cared either.

Ian was surprised by that. While the Doctor he travelled with was getting better, he recalled their first trip, how they had travelled back in time in Earth's history where the Doctor had nearly killed a caveman. Had this Doctor not learnt anything from that incident?

"How long can it last though? I mean the Ship we're using isn't in fully functional order," Susan pointed out, interrupting Ians' thoughts, not noting the indignant look her Doctor was sending her for reminding them all of the faults of the TARDIS.

"I don't know," the female Doctor said; she usually wouldn't admit anything like this to anyone else, but considering her closeness to Susan she knew she needed to be at least honest with her. Besides Susan knew better than others just how poor condition the TARDIS was beside herself. "That's why we need to be quick and discover a solution to this problem that can work." The female third Doctor looked around the station with a sigh of frustration. "We're not going to make a lot of progress here. How far away is your TARDIS, Doctor?" She asked her original physically older self, much to the surprise of the two humans, but not that of Susan or her original self, although the First Doctor was surprised by the question.

The First Doctor studied the third carefully, wondering what she had in mind for his TARDIS. "What do you want in the Ship, my dear?" He asked cautiously, running through his own mind.

The female Doctor rubbed her face in frustration, gesturing carelessly towards the still frozen forms of the Time Agents; Ian and Barbara both wondered how long they would stay like that, but they didn't think it was a good idea to ask. "Thanks to these two idiots, the Type 35 won't respond to my sonic screwdriver anymore, so that option has been cut off from us for good. However, we can use the same technique by using your TARDIS and by connecting the two together," the female Doctor replied before she gestured around the station, "If not then the time bubble my version of the TARDIS is generating will collapse. Already it's being affected by the pulses. I know you don't like using the TARDIS like this, especially given the shortcomings its suffered, but we have to take the risk."

The First Doctor had obviously taken the point given how serious and how grave he appeared. "Very well, my dear. However, let us hope we can find a solution quickly to this problem, especially if they get involved," he made a face as he referenced the Time Lords.

Susan and the Third Doctor both reacted the same way, although the First Doctor saw with some concern his future self looked almost nonchalant and considering that he himself had only just left Gallifrey, he knew she didn't have much to worry about. The group left the station with the two Doctors and Susan busy making plans on the task ahead of them, but as they did Ian broke the silence.

"What's Brexit?" The human schoolteacher asked suddenly.

The three Time Lords turned at the question, their minds identifying the historical event of 21st century Earth followed closely by the COVID-19 crisis. But they were worried instinctively about what would make Ian, someone from the 1960s, ask about that, and as she turned herself the female Doctor saw the reason why.

Ian was looking at the newspaper stand in the entrance. It was reading something about Brexit, but the Doctor didn't bother reading what it was.

"Nothing for you to worry about, Ian," the third Doctor said firmly, pulling the human away from the newspaper stand; she might trust Ian and Barbara implicitly, but she still remembered how Barbara had tried to change history when she had seen the barbarism of the Aztec religion. Back then the Doctor had known nothing Barbara could have done would have worked, the Aztec sacrifices were fixed in time and space and there was nothing she could have done about it. This was different, but the Doctor knew Ian would never be able to change history, but foreknowledge was sometimes not a good thing.

The female Doctor ignored Ian's protests as she dragged the human out of the station much to his surprise, but she was stronger than she appeared. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted her original self's approving gaze. But fortunately, the human schoolteacher was unresisting as the Doctor pulled him away, he knew he couldn't change history even with an article in a newspaper.

XXX

Both versions of the Doctor and Susan were relieved to return to the TARDIS belonging to the First Doctor, for differing reasons. However, in the meantime the third Doctor had taken the opportunity to see for herself just how much damage the temporal fracturing had caused. She had been nervous after she had spotted different versions of Cybermen - her opening encounter with them in her current life to say nothing of her frequent meetings with them in her second had made her hate them a great deal, never mind Daleks. Still, it had been informative; the fracturing of space and time must be getting worse if more versions of Cybermen through their history, it was almost like flipping through a photography collection.

The First Doctor slipped in the TARDIS key and stepped inside, followed closely by his companions while the Third Doctor looked around, taking in the future of the room which her original self had put in, or the antiques collected around that time.

Her predecessor had moved the objects of the First Doctor's collection around the room, even moving them deeper into the TARDIS.

That was typical with regeneration; it was like someone moving through their years, either as a teenager or a young adult; gradually they would paint their room a different colour, favouring something like purple, before deciding on a lighter colour, like yellow. At the same time, they would be developing different interests.

It was no different with regeneration. Many of the things in her original incarnation's console room were still in her version of the TARDIS, but she had completely removed everything to give her and the scientists involved with the British Rocket Group room to work in. It was strange seeing the console room exactly like it had been before her original regeneration, but the Doctor quickly walked over to the console while her younger self approached as well.

The Doctor looked at her younger self, noting how slowly he moved despite knowing he had a lot of energy still in that ancient, frail form. Many on Gallifrey had mocked her original self for his physical age and health problems, in turn, he had advised several young Time Lords never to waste their lives. Looking back the female Doctor felt it had been typical of her original self's hubris, shoving his views down others' throats. Granted, she knew she had the same basic underlying personality, but if there was one thing her regeneration into a feminine body with a feminine mindset had taught her, it was to take a step backwards, and one forwards. Looking back, the Doctor regretted everything she had put Susan and her earliest companions through; not only had she snatched Susan away with deceit without telling her until the TARDIS was already leaving Gallifrey, she had essentially made Susan dependent on her without letting her grow, or encouraging her to make her own way in life. At the same time, she had snatched two humans away from their home time and place. She couldn't change history, and her personal history was impossible to alter; while the two years she and Susan had travelled with Ian and Barbara had changed their lives for the better in many ways, she had made so many mistakes with them in turn.

Her first self had been locked in a mindset where he believed everything he said and did was justified because he was the one doing it. But now she was older, more mature, and had regenerated twice, her perception of things had changed.

She shook her head for a moment, knowing she was only thinking about her past regrets because she was being confronted with them. And she didn't like it, not one little bit.

She hated being confronted with her mistakes, and they were all around her; how she had just decided to run away from Gallifrey without giving herself the time to properly plan out her departure in detail, virtually kidnapping Susan while doing the same later with Ian and Barbara, and now she was paying for them with her exile. Was this going to be happening to her throughout her exile? The Doctor had known the moment she had found herself on Earth in her current form, her time struggling to get the TARDIS working again so she could escape would give her the time to think and dwell. And she had.

The Doctor looked down at the console and her hands gently manipulated the controls. She closed her eyes in irritation.

"What is it?" Susan asked.

"The TARDIS… it's gone deeper into the Vortex, and now its engine pulses are spreading further out. But I don't know how much further out, and if my own version of this TARDIS," she gestured at the console, "has compensated. I think she has, but the problem is the TARDIS is already pushing all of her power into sustaining the bubble."

"How long can it last?" The First Doctor asked.

"I don't know," the Third Doctor replied, looking up into the eyes she hadn't worn for a century. "My TARDIS has recently received a tune-up in certain systems; the only problem is I haven't been on Earth long enough to make a proper difference. I've been assessing the damage to the systems, working on what I can in the meantime and developing my knowledge slowly of the Type 40's functions. I did some work on the system which would generate the time bubble, but I didn't have a lot of time to work on the equipment which would generate the time bubble around Morden. God knows what kind of state they're in now."

"What will happen if your TARDIS can't sustain the temporal bubble, Doctor?" Barbara asked.

The Third Doctor looked up, her face severe. "If my TARDIS can't sustain the time bubble, the universe will be overrun with alternate timelines; potential possibilities of what could have been. Think of it; you two come from a timeline where the Nazis lost the Second World War. Imagine what would happen if this timeline mixes with a timeline where the Germans not only won the war, but they had locked up the King of the country, executed Churchill - nice man, although making sure he doesn't get his hands on the TARDIS key is hard work - and begin setting up camps to wipe out everyone who doesn't conform to their ideas of racial purity. Imagine a world where that happened, but it began to mix with a timeline where those events never happened, but the potential was still there. Paradox. A temporal paradox. It can cause tremendous damage to the timeline, and I do mean tremendous. Imagine a world where someone dies, but imagine a reality where people who are meant to be alive in one timeline are dead in another, the universe could go pop."

Ian and Barbara looked at each other, both of them stunned by the images that had popped into her mind; when the Doctor described the two different timelines mixing up, Ian had the image of two separate eggs being whisked together in a mixture until they blended, but he knew this was something completely different, and infinitely more unpleasant.

But then again the 40s had been far from pleasant. The idea of everything the allies had fought and died for going up in flames and the Nazis occupying Britain horrified them both. What made it worse was the fact that an invasion could have happened; Ian and Barbara had both been with the Doctor long enough to know just because history unfolded the way it had, didn't necessarily mean there hadn't been potential possibilities where history could and would have followed a completely different path.

But the thing that frightened them both the most was they didn't understand the mechanics of the temporal paradox the Doctor had just described; they had picked up quite a lot from their time with the Doctor the mechanics of time travel, but they had picked up enough to know some paradoxes were more devastating than others, but since this Doctor and the older Doctor were both reacting to the matter more seriously, they knew it was one of the more devastating ones.

"What happens if we can't stop it?" Barbara asked quietly.

The two Doctors shared a look. "What would happen if two objects shared the same space, my dear?" The First Doctor asked.

Ian understood instantly. "One of them would be displaced. Oh my god!" He whispered as the realisation appeared in his face.

"What?" Barbara's voice was frightened.

"It would mean the end of your timeline," the Third Doctor explained shortly, already getting back to work with the console. She was trying to see if she could link this version of the TARDIS to her own, hoping the time damage would mean the Laws of Time were flexible enough to prevent the Blinovitch Limitation Effect from taking place. But she quickly became frustrated when she discerned the relevant systems needed to keep the time bubble sustained were crippled. She cursed herself under her breath; it was so infuriating every system that she needed were in terrible condition and had been since she had left Gallifrey.

"I can't create the bubble," she said, looking down at the console with barely hidden frustration. "The systems aren't functional."

"So we can't do anything?"

The Doctor looked into Susan's frightened eyes, but she shook her head. "No. Never. There are dozens of ways we could reverse this; its just a matter of finding a few which have the means of working right."

The First Doctor had been silent for some time. He had been going over everything he himself was thinking while he kept watching over what his future self was doing at the console. The only problem was he had dozens of ideas, the only hard part was finding one which could work with their limited resources.

"Do you have any ideas, my dear?" He asked his future self; it was disconcerting using the endearment on his future self, but he needed to know if she shared the same ideas as he did.

"One or two," the Doctor admitted and she pulled something out of her pocket. The First Doctor and Susan both recognised the leather-like material of the wrist strap of the Vortex Manipulator.

"Where did you get that?" Susan asked.

"I stole it from one of the Time Agents; I thought it might come in handy, and right now it's our only chance. Vortex Manipulators may not be as advanced as a TARDIS, but they can access times and places a TARDIS can't," the female Doctor explained.

Susan and the First Doctor both gasped in unison when they began to get an idea of the female Doctor's plan, but before they could say anything about the plan, the Doctors and Susan were surprised when the console began beeping.

"The communications array?" Susan looked at the two versions of her grandfather in surprise. "There's a transmission out there."

"A transmission?" The Third Doctor repeated, going over to the relevant panel where she stabbed the controls in surprise. "It's a wide-bream temporal transmission, broadcasted through the Time Vortex. Odd, I'd have thought the damage to the Vortex would be too much for a transmission…"

"It must be broadcasted through an augmented temporal transmitter, my dear. Interesting," the First Doctor tapped his finger against his mouth in thought. He looked at his future self while she worked on the console. "How clear is it?"

"It's pretty clear," the female Doctor replied, looking thoughtfully at the console. "I think it must have been transmitted through a continuum inhibitor or shield of some kind for it to be broadcasted this clearly, but I've found out it's being broadcasted through the entire universe within the Epoch of Mass Time Travel."

"That crosses a large chunk of the universe's timeline."

"I know, beginning from a few billion years ago to within a few million years before the end of the universe," the female Doctor nodded while she worked on the console, examining the message; she couldn't tell where and when the message was being broadcasted, but it was being broadcasted through the whole universe to every race and planet with the means of translating it; she found that although the message was simple, there was an automatic language translation algorithm attached. "Ahah! I've got it!"

With a hit of the switch, the message was delivered. "_This is the voice of __**Stopwatch. **__We have created these holes in time and space to remind the Time Lords, and the other members of the Temporal Powers we will not allow them to devastate history by their careless time travelling. Disband your time travel facilities, and do not travel through history again! You are causing untold amounts of devastation-!"_

The female Doctor shut down the message with a smack against the console in anger and disgust. She had heard this ignorant rant before, many times. She looked up and looked grimly at the faces of her original self and Susan.

"Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did," she said to them.

They nodded, their expressions just as grim.


	7. Chapter 7

I own neither Doctor Who, nor the Twilight Zone, and the reasons why I selected The Twilight Zone should be made more clearer in this and later chapters.

Mark - It would have been simpler, and more convenient if you had bothered to have an account I could message to, but it doesn't matter now. In some accounts, you're right, but I like to think Susan didn't have much idea of what the Doctor was doing. As for Ian and Barbara... Have you not seen An Unearthly Child? He did kidnap them both. And the Thirteenth Doctor was older, more experienced, and she only took her gang to Desolation by accident rather than by design.

Anyway, please let me know what you think.

* * *

A Nexus of Strangeness.

"Er, I think sit would be best if one of you three explained to us," Ian gestured between himself and Barbara, "about what Stopwatch is all about?"

Ian's question drew attention from Susan and the Doctors, who were now looking at each sheepishly; they had, more or less, forgotten all about the two humans within the TARDIS.

The female Doctor sighed. "Yes, sorry Ian," she apologised as she glanced at her first human companion, "you're right; it would be good if you knew what Stopwatch is. Stopwatch is from around the same era as the Time Agency. It's an organisation that is run by humans, although over the years their membership has expanded, and they're very well equipped until they have the kind of weapons which makes the 51st century one of the most weapon obsessed eras imaginable."

"I….see," Ian replied, sending a look at Barbara, who looked just as confused and worried as her friend and fellow schoolteacher did himself.

"But I was only telling you that so then you knew just how mad they are," the female Doctor went on, and she took a deep breath for a moment, choosing her words before she spoke again. "When the Time Agency was first set up, their primary job was to police time and space like police do in your time. Except no-one realised that when the Agency was first set up, they would become corrupt. But it was when they began meddling with the past, the consequences began to worry a group out there who came to believe time travel was dangerous, and after they had meddled in important moments in history, and the damage was barely prevented, this group became more worried. They formed Stopwatch, a terrorist time travelling organisation who, ironically, use time travel to make their point. They're time travelling eco-terrorists, and they journey through time and space and they try to create a number of disasters in the past to make sure all time travel is banned throughout the universe."

"The Temporal Powers including the Time Lords have been trying to get rid of Stopwatch for a long time," Susan took up the explanation now, "although some of their ideas do make sense."

The Doctor turned to glance at Susan at that -

…_she was back on Gallifrey. She was alone. She was going to leave tonight! As she walked through the corridors, the Doctor realised something was wrong; she seemed slower, and as she ran through the corridors of the Capitol she felt a pain in her chest. As she was racing past a piece of reflective surface, she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye. _

_She was stunned when she saw the flash of silvery-white hair which was not her hair colour anymore and the dark clothes which covered a clearly masculine if thin and frail body. And then she realised what she was seeing in the mirror. She was back in the aged body of her first incarnation, the very incarnation she was standing with inside the TARDIS console room, but she was running as fast as she could through the corridors of the citadel towards the TARDIS bay. As she ran, cursing the fact she wasn't as fast as she used to be when she arrived at the TARDIS bay. _

_She smiled as she walked through the bay, walking up to the white cabinet form of her own TARDIS-_

"Except they're causing far more damage to the timelines, my dear," the First Doctor's voice broke through whatever memory was running through the female Doctor's mind, and for a moment she had problems concentrating on what she had just experienced and what she was doing in real life. "Stopwatch has somehow managed to acquire a TARDIS, and we all know how dangerous that can be for the universe. Is that not correct, my dear?"

The female Doctor jumped a little when she realised he was speaking to her. "What? Oh, yes… definitely."

"Is there something wrong?"

The female Doctor looked at Susan again to see if the strange phenomenon would occur again -

…_.Still, in the body of her first incarnation, the Doctor slipped a key out of the pocket of her robes and slipped it into the keyhole of her TARDIS. She remembered all those days she had spent inside her Type 50, exploring the depths; while all TARDISes were the same internally, while there were a few differences, she had wanted to spend her time there, exploring the very same ship which was going to take her away from Gallifrey, away from her people-_

The female Doctor winced and put a hand to her head. Suddenly she felt hands on her shoulders, two different sets but she couldn't immediately tell who they belonged to at that point while she nursed a terrible assault on her temporal senses. She didn't understand how she was getting it, although she wondered if it was due to the temporal shielding around her, but that made sense. How could temporal shielding do that to her, make her see those memories, and she knew they were memories.

"What's the matter, my dear?" She looked up blearily into the concerned eyes of her first incarnation.

"I…don't know," she whispered, feeling her temporal senses aching before she managed, somehow, to push the pain aside; she would consider what had happened later, and how it involved her old Type 50, which had vanished so long ago, and was the reason why she was determined to return to Gallifrey to steal a later model to resume her travels through time and space.

"That doesn't matter," she forced herself to say, wondering why she was clearly remembering a memory she couldn't even remember which involved her Type 50, but she was curious because she could not work out why she was remembering something she couldn't remember, "our first priority is that TARDIS; its probably throwing out temporal energy and affecting our protection," she added as confidently as she could, hoping her passing off the damaged TARDIS's condition would be enough to throw her original self off while she worked out why she was remembering something which never happened.

"Right….," the female Doctor needed a moment to muster her thoughts and focus on the problem at hand while trying to work out what those memories meant, but she dismissed them for now. "My idea was this. I tap the Vortex Manipulator into your TARDIS, and use the power of the Heart of your ship to get inside."

"Mm, I see, my dear," the First Doctor said. "So you plan on using the Manipulator to stabilise the TARDIS engines and then repair the damage?"

The female Doctor took a deep breath, knowing her first incarnation wouldn't like the reply to the plan she had in mind. "That's one idea," she began, "but I want to prevent this disaster from happening in the first place."

The First Doctor and Susan instantly realised what she was talking about. The female Doctor mentally sighed at their predictable looks of surprise and, in the case of her original self, anger and outrage. She remembered how it had been back in that first body of hers, always mentally adhering to the Time Lord's rules about non-intervention and the belief history couldn't be damaged, although she had known even back then sometimes history could be altered. Her attitude had changed slightly, it was a sign of her greater age, experience, but it was also down to regenerating twice and losing the bits of brainpower which had made her even care in the first place.

Now she was thinking about it, the female Doctor wondered to herself if this was, Rassilon forbid, how the Monk felt. The Monk regularly changed history all the time, and while the Doctor instantly condemned him for meddling in established events, she didn't have a problem with him for meddling in points of flux.

"No! No, I forbid it!" The First Doctor protested, breaking through her thoughts of the Monk.

"I know how you feel-!" The female Doctor protested back, but the First Doctor instantly spoke over her, his voice rising in volume. "Oh, you do do you? Well, then, _Doctor, _why would you break the Laws of Time-?!"

"Time is too badly damaged. I don't like the thought of using a paradox to stop this from happening, but I am out of options. Look at the readings," the female Doctor's hands flashed over the controls, and the scanner activated with its customary whirl and a sphere appeared on the screen. Ian studied it closely before he realised he was looking at Morden and the rest of Surrey as he knew it, from his own century and time, but there were other times in between, and there were clearly versions of Morden and London and Surrey where things weren't what he was used to, but all of those moments were overlapping.

"Take your hands off of the console! You cannot be me if you would break the Laws of Time!" The First Doctor snapped while he glared at his future female self in outrage. "I would never break the Laws of Time, and the fact you would shows you cannot be me."

Meanwhile, Susan was looking at the screen in horror. "Grandfather, look at the scanner."

"Now, Susan, don't interrupt me-," the old Doctor said, but Ian spoke over him.

"Doctor - Doctors - is it just me or is that sphere on the scanner growing in size?"

The question drew the First Doctor's attention to the screen and he stared up at the screen in shock. "How extraordinary," he whispered, but the female Doctor looked at her original self in contempt.

"No, it's not. Don't you see what's going on? There's nothing extraordinary about it, and stop sounding like someone who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. Thanks to those idiots from the Time Agency that old TARDIS has been driven deeper and deeper into time, so it's tearing through potential timelines. One way of stopping it is to get inside the TARDIS and reset the engines, and use their power to repair the damage while pushing those other realities away from our own," the female Doctor spat in frustration. "And the longer you go on about the Laws of Time, let me remind you that if we're careful there won't be any long term effects to history."

While she was speaking, the female Doctor had placed the Manipulator onto the console and before the First Doctor could do anything, her hands tapped at the controls, and as she worked the miniature screen on the Manipulator lit up, as the computer built into it received new space/time coordinates.

"Anyway, its too late," the female Doctor snatched up the Manipulator. "Sorry, and goodbye!"

With that, she vanished when she triggered the Manipulator….

XXX

…. and she found herself feeling as if her body had been squashed, stretched, and she screamed in pain as the transference tore through her temporal senses - the Doctor's best guest for later on would be the Vortex Manipulator's jump had been rougher than normal because the wrist-worn time machine was forced to transfer through a badly damaged point in time where alternate timelines were overlapping and were badly rippling through established and predicted history while she was trying to reach a crippled TARDIS, trying to break through the defences of it while teleporting out of a TARDIS, and jumping time tracks in order to reach it - before she landed on a hard floor, although she wasn't sure if she had landed or if she had fallen.

The Doctor realised she had her eyes closed, and so when she reopened them she instantly shut them as the dizziness she was experiencing made it virtually impossible for her concentrate. Still, she took a deep breath and she reopened her eyes again, and she forced herself to look around and focus on something she could use to reorientate herself although she had something to concentrate on, a low, rumbling bell that rang ominously in the air. Ah, she saw what looked like a shape ahead of her, and she focused hard on it before it began to solidify and more details began to become clearer.

"Concentrate on one thing," the Doctor whispered to herself. "One thing…."

The mantra she had used immediately after she had woken up from her first regeneration following the mess at Snowcap base, the Mondasian Cybermen, Mondas, Cutler's bloodthirsty arrogance mixing with his desperation to save his son to regain her sanity shortly after the regeneration worked, and she looked around and she found herself in a TARDIS control room. She studied the console from her position on the floor and smiled when she saw the clear similarity between this console and the Type 40 she used. This console lacked several of the controls and displays from her own TARDIS, and that was confirmation enough.

The shudders were the second confirmation she needed as were the chimes of the Cloister Bell, and she crawled over to the console and she reached out a hand and heaved herself up. Once she was standing up once again, the Doctor stumbled a little bit.

"Oooh," she moaned while she only just managed to grasp the console before she fell over. "That's it!" She whispered. "I am never ever using a Vortex Manipulator again. Next time, I'll find a better way to travel through time and space. But of course," she thought to herself bitterly, "I won't have a choice if my plan works out…"

The TARDIS shuddered again, and the Doctor was nearly thrown off of her feet. "Ow!" She hissed when she was thrown partly to the floor, but she managed to catch herself just in time, only for her chin to smack into the console.

Once she was standing upright properly once more, the Doctor clung to the console once again, and she reflected on her insane plan to avert this disaster. She knew her First self was right, she was about to break the Laws of Time by using a temporal paradox to prevent this mess.

Her plan was simple enough; she would access this TARDIS's telepathic circuits once she had checked the navigational logs and found where this TARDIS had been sent from, and then she'd reach out into the past, using the temporal energy spilling out into this time period to give her message a boost, and then she'd divert this TARDIS to a place where a younger version of herself would be. The recent events - the overlapping timelines, time moving at different rates - they would never have happened, but the Doctor was confident she could use this TARDIS to boost the Manipulator and break her out so she could escape the time paradox.

Using her hands and bracing herself, the Doctor went around the console. What she had in mind was dangerous, but she was hopeful for her chances of success. All she needed to do was to head for the navigational controls, and find out what Stopwatch had done to send the TARDIS careening into the 1950s. But as she was about to reach those systems, she passed by the telepathic circuits and she saw something that drew her attention. They were flashing. The Doctor frowned, staring at them curiously. There was a message being broadcasted. That shouldn't be happening….

The Doctor gasped as the telepathic circuits activated and broadcasted its message into her mind without having any time to stop it…


	8. Chapter 8

**I am so sorry it has been so long, but I had wanted to upload a new chapter at the start of the month but I couldn't because the site glitched. **

**Enjoy, and please let me know what you think. **

* * *

A Nexus of Strangeness.

…immediately feeling another mind, one which felt slightly familiar to her, but it connected to her mind effortlessly while her mind was plugged into what she recognised as a mental landscape similar to what you would have found on Gallifrey when someone was plugged into the Matrix. But this, this was similar but it was simpler at the same time. And she knew she wasn't alone. The moment she regained awareness after being pulled into the telepathic circuits of the old TARDIS, the Doctor realised she could sense two mental signatures, both of them from different TARDISes, the one she was currently in and another, which seemed both far away and yet so close.

She winced as she felt the older TARDIS's panic and fear over what was happening to time, not that she could blame the older ship.

"Hello, Doctor."

Mentally the Doctor recoiled, although she didn't know why; her best guess would be she was so startled by the suddenness of the telepathic conference when she had fully expected to receive a message. But now she knew, the message had been akin to a telephone caller saying hello, beginning a conversation. "Who are you? What's going on?" She asked, realising it was one of the TARDISes, a female one by the tone of the voice. But she was surprised by how well it knew her.

"It has been so long, hasn't it? We were very close, you and I, and yet at the same time we were virtual strangers with one another, although I loved you and wanted to be with you before you were pulled away from me. I thought you had abandoned me at first, and then I looked back and realised you had been manipulated mentally into choosing another," the voice spoke and as the voice went on, the Doctor frowning as she felt amusement, love and anger at the same time coming through loud and clear. This TARDIS was unhappy and yet she was clearly relieved to be near her again.

"Who are you?" The Doctor asked; this conversation was fascinating, but she didn't want to be playing a game of riddles over and over again when there was so much at stake.

"I am your TARDIS. Your first TARDIS."

The Doctor gasped, kicking herself in her mind for being so stupid. Of course, why was she being so stupid? She'd sensed some degree of familiarity with the telepathic message, but it had been a century since she had even sensed, never mind been inside her first TARDIS so it was understandable she didn't immediately recognise who the message was from. "My old Type 50," she gasped.

"Yes, Doctor."

"How are you here?" The Doctor struggled to understand. "You should be on Gallifrey."

"I am; I am broadcasting this message across space and time. And then you were forced to abandon me," the TARDIS replied, anger and sadness in her voice.

"What?" The Doctor said, wondering what her first TARDIS meant by that, and surprised the Type 50 was capable of broadcasting the message on its own.

"How much do you remember about your original plans to leave Gallifrey?" The TARDIS countered, her earlier feelings of anger and sadness fading, replaced by genuine curiosity.

"Not a great deal," the Doctor replied, struggling to recall the events questioned by the Type 50 TARDIS while digging through her own curiosity about the relevance and what it meant for what was going on now. "I mean, I was preparing to leave shortly after graduating from the Academy. I was tired of Gallifrey, but I'd given life out of the Academy a brief try for a bit. I remember visiting the Panopticon archives to study alien races and worlds outside of Gallifrey, and I made lists of places I wanted to visit and people whom I'd wanted to meet. I did this for three-four years before I decided to leave, but then it gets vague."

"I thought as much. I thought you had abandoned me for a miserable, dilapidated Type 40, without a functional navigational circuit and a chameleon circuit that was falling to pieces," the TARDIS replied, a vaguely smug tone in her voice which reminded the Doctor slightly of her first self. "But then I found out you had been manipulated into abandoning me."

"What?" The Doctor felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, her mental stomach and in her physical stomach. "What do you mean I was manipulated into abandoning you?"

"When you came to me, you were setting the controls on my console. You said-," the TARDIS began, but the Doctor gasped as she remembered what had happened distinctly.

"I said _"We're going on a long journey, you and I," _and then everything went blank…. But the next thing I remember was being on Gallifrey, and the rest, as they say, is history," the Doctor whispered, remembering all of those years she'd spent on Gallifrey before leaving the planet with Susan. It was so long ago and so much was blurred from her memory it was incredible, but it was coming back to her now with frightening clarity.

Yes. She remembered now, she had planned to escape Gallifrey, but she had wanted to get her graduation over and done with - she wasn't like Drax or the Monk, she wasn't going to drop out of the Academy even if she had been tempted to just steal a TARDIS after getting her Rassilon Imprimature after that mess with Millennia and Rallon and the Celestial Toymaker. She was going to graduate and while she didn't give a damn about being at the top of the class or not since she knew in the long term it meant little if you were better at everything than everybody else, she did want to have finished her education before she left Gallifrey.

She'd had it worked out as well. She would graduate and spend a few years understanding her Type 50, while at the same time she would be going over the available records of the Time Lords, studying planets and peoples and making lists. She had soon wanted to meet people from Elvis Presley, Mozart, Beethoven, William Shakespeare, Leonardo DaVinci, and so on. Now she remembered her plans and what she'd wanted to do, the Doctor could remember standing in the console room of her first TARDIS, planning on leaving the Time Lords and Gallifrey. So why had she decided to stay?

The TARDIS had said she was manipulated, but why? By whom? What was it all for?

"You were manipulated by the Celestial Intervention Agency," her TARDIS said.

The Doctor wasn't surprised by her first TARDIS's answer; in this telepathic environment, it would be pathetically easy for her original ship to read her mind. "The Agency? Why?"

"It would be easier if I showed you the truth…"

The Doctor gasped, clamping her hands to her head as she felt her head feeling like it was about to split open. It felt as if the Type 50 was both tearing through her memories, and yet pouring memories into her mind. It was such a confusing mix the Doctor didn't have the first clue what was going on.

"What-?"

"Relax, Doctor," the Doctor felt as if the TARDIS was soothing her mind, like an elder sibling or a spouse soothing her wife. "It'll become clear…"

And it did become clear. A number of memories that she felt were familiar came bursting out of her mind, as if they'd been walled up by a dam.

She was standing underneath a portal as a child in golden robes and the Doctor knew this child was her even if she didn't have any memory of this event before now - it was like she was suffering from amnesia and yet the memory was unfolding in her head, or a wormhole that led…somewhere else, and she didn't have any clear memories of where she had come from. A woman dressed in rough clothes approached her, introducing herself as Tecteun, a Gallifreyan explorer who had left her world to explore, and had come to the world she was on, wondering what she was doing there…

For years, the pair of them had travelled through space, visiting dozens of worlds and encountered many civilisations in their infancy while all the time Tecteun was curious about her, wondering where she was from but not finding anything conclusive. After a long time travelling the universe, witnessing so many wonders, and then they had travelled to Gallifrey. While Tecteun was giving her people the knowledge she had accumulated, which advanced Gallifreyan science and technology, she, the Doctor, hadn't had an easy time. While she had been accepted by the other Gallifreyans up to a point, she hadn't felt like it was home since many of them looked down on her since she was an alien.

And then it happened. The memory unfolding in the Doctor's mind felt both alien and yet terrifyingly familiar to her; she was playing with a friend near a cliff, and by accident, she fell. She remembered Tectuen rushing to help, to see if there was anything she could do, only there wasn't. And then she regenerated, the very first time a regeneration had taken place on Gallifrey.

Her relationship with Tecteun changed completely after that; the woman had always shown a more diluted form of the same silly prejudices typical of the Gallifreyans, but she'd always been a mother figure to her. That all changed; suddenly she had gone from a pseudo loved adopted daughter to a laboratory experiment, forced to undergo one experiment after another as Tecteun tried to understand regeneration and splice it into herself and to Gallifreyans everywhere in order to rid themselves of the Kotturah's judgement their people shouldn't have immortality.

It cost her several regenerations, each one more painful than the last as Tecteun obsessed over it, and the Doctor felt her love for the woman slip away with each year she spent in that laboratory. Finally, when Tecteun discovered a way of splicing regeneration into her body, that was when everything changed completely. Soon she gave her people the ability, using her knowledge gleaned from exploring space and her new insights into time to guide the people of Gallifrey into studying time travel.

They had referred to her in secret as the Timeless Child.

The name was fairly poetic. She had given the Time Lords the power of regeneration, although her origins were clouded from memory even then.

When the Gallifreyan elite became the Time Lords, the Doctor was roped into joining the Division although she didn't have any doubt in her mind the Division and the Celestial Intervention Agency were one and the same bureau.

Memories stretching back centuries filled the Doctor's mind of incarnations that had been blocked out of her memory for a very very long time, of missions for the Division which intervened in events, using one regeneration after another. In some of the regenerations the Doctor had, they were loyal members of the Division although they were worried over many of the missions. And then there were some regenerations who hated the organisation; in the end, it became so much, one incarnation had tried to escape.

They made themselves human, hid on Earth for decades with a protector before the Judoon, of all people, turned up and threatened their sanctuary - and there was a strange woman, a blonde woman who wielded a sonic screwdriver although she hadn't known it at the time, and wore a long coat. After her memories had been restored, that incarnation had tried to escape the Judoon and the member of the Division quickly, but the blonde woman who was apparently her as well didn't understand what was going on. After the operative was killed in a trap, the two Doctors parted ways, but for the one on the run from the Division, time was running out.

And then her other self was captured - the Doctor mentally winced as she remembered the way the Time Lords had force regenerated her, regressing her age until she was a child in a new body, complete with no memories of who and what she had been before. The child would grow into her first incarnation, and when they did…

The Doctor couldn't believe the conspiracy theory dawning in her mind. The Celestial Intervention Agency. She had known the organisation had employed Vansell to watch her during her time at the Academy, although she had never found out why or what the point was so she hadn't really paid any attention to the matter. But the Agency… they must have known, well some of them must have known - she couldn't believe Vansell would have known about this if he had then the insular fool would have likely said something without knowing the consequences.

It all made sense.

All of her life, she had never felt like she was one of them; oh, she was a Time Lord, thanks to her bond with her TARDIS, her TARDISes, but she had never been at home on Gallifrey despite her best efforts. And now she knew why. She wasn't one of them. She had been found on an alien world, thousands of years ago, possessing an ability unknown to the Gallifreyans until it was spliced into their bodies and they became the Time Lords, believing they were better than every race in the cosmos.

The conspiracy was extensive. It was the Agency who had made sure she couldn't leave Gallifrey in her Type 50, and they'd conditioned her mind so she would abandon her first TARDIS, and they'd apparently manipulated events which would force her to leave Gallifrey in a hurry. Some of the reasons the Doctor had wanted to leave was because she was not one of them and she knew it - the Hybrid, getting bored… they were nothing compared to that.

They had wanted her to go into the universe, ironically believing they were free to do what she wanted and visit where she wanted, but in truth, she was doing the Division or the CIA's work for them without knowing it. It was clever, the Doctor gave them that, but it was so elaborate…

And the old Type 40 was at the heart of the whole thing, unwillingly of course, but it was forced to obey the Time Lords and was provided with knowledge of places where things were out of sync with the vision of the timeline.

The Division apparently fed knowledge, hints of disasters and made the TARDIS's matrix think she was taking her to places where she was needed. The whole thing was so insidious, just to keep her as an agent of the Time Lords, and the worst of it was she hadn't seen it happening at all. All of these years, she had never imagined the Celestial Intervention Agency had come up with a plan for keeping her in their ranks, albeit secretly, without her even knowing it.

That was why Vansell had been recruited. His job had been to make sure the plan was followed through, although he hadn't even known what was going on.

"I was amazed when I discovered the extent of the Agencies plans."

"How did you discover them aside from when I didn't use you to leave?" The Doctor asked.

"I found out after I stole the biography from Gallifrey."

"What? How is that possible?" The Doctor asked, checking her memory for any sign of a TARDIS doing something like this and realised this was unique.

"I hired a private investigator to find you after you'd left, but she found out nothing I didn't already know although she told me you'd gone out into the universe; I was furious but as I probed her mind when your friends - the one you call the Master and the other called the Rani - tried to interrogate her themselves, I found out her mind showed signs of being conditioned. The only people on Gallifrey who could do that are the High Council or the CIA. I wanted to go after you, but I stayed when I looked on in the timelines and realised you would arrive back on Gallifrey in your previous incarnation, but I couldn't reach you." the Type 50 explained. "But before I sent this message, I accessed the Matrix and your biodata. I was surprised when I got two different biographies, and I learnt of the Timeless Child and everything about what had happened."

"And then you contacted me from Gallifrey to Earth to free me?" The Doctor asked, not sure whether she should be sceptical or not by the unexpected timing of the contact of her old TARDIS, but she was grateful nonetheless.

"Yes. You didn't deserve what had happened to you. When I learnt you were exiled, I sent this message to Earth but I found the old Type 35 being sent to the planet because of Stopwatch."

"And you couldn't intervene? I find that hard to believe," the Doctor folded her mental arms.

"I did try, but by the time I realised what was happening, time was already badly damaged," the TARDIS countered firmly, and the Doctor believed her. "But you can't use your idea, Doctor. However, I do know what you can do."

"What?" The Doctor asked, wondering what her ship had in mind.

"What you planned before those Time Agents appeared, only with me here broadcasting this message to you, a fully functioning and advanced TARDIS, you can use me to pull the Type 35 out of the time rift," the Type 50 said. "In fact, thanks to being connected through you, Doctor I am pulling the Type 35 out of the rift. You can use it to return to Gallifrey; I've uploaded the coordinates to my location, and a formula for bypassing the transduction barriers."

The Doctor quickly checked the older TARDIS's systems through the telepathic circuits and found the TARDIS was linked to her first TARDIS in interlock from such a long distance while the coordinate programmer was set for a trip to Gallifrey, and that was not all... the Doctor's eyes widened; her Type 50 had sent a formula for bouncing through the transduction barriers without the Time Lords detecting the TARDIS signature. And that wasn't all, the engines had been deactivated after the polarity of the energy systems had been reversed so the temporal fracturing was reversed which restored the timelines.

The Doctor began to smile, and then she remembered her earlier self and his companions.

"Don't worry," the Type 50 reassured her, "I have already nudged your past self's Type 40 away from this timezone before they arrived. As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, their arrival was just an interesting possibility."

"Oh," the Doctor could only say, knowing that type of temporal manipulation was extremely delicate and should nave be done unless the meddler knew what they were doing. She didn't say a word as she felt the TARDIS - the Type 50 - push her out of the Type 35's mental landscape, although she felt and heard the older ships' relief and delight to be freed from the time rift. At the same time, the abilities of her old TARDIS being able to do something like this from Gallifrey amazed the Doctor.

She let go of the telepathic circuits and she checked the instruments. Everything looked alright, and as she checked the local time zone for damage, she wasn't surprised to see there was some residual damage to local time and space, but it didn't look too serious. If it wasn't for the Type 50, the damage would be much worse and it would never have been resolved. And then the Doctor smiled as the thought sprang to her mind despite the incredible life reeling revelations she had just discovered, and then she jumped when the console vibrated with the sound of dematerialisation filling the air. She quickly checked the controls, seeing the TARDIS was heading straight for Gallifrey.

As she patted the console, the full extent of what her old ship had told her in the mental landscape generated by the telepathic circuits hit her.


End file.
